The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
A biography of cancer: its history, its science, the lives it has claimed and the battles fought against it. Mukherjee writes with the rigor of an oncologist and the soul of a novelist. Won the Pulitzer in 2011, named the best book of the year by Time, and gave millions of patients and families a framework for understanding the disease.
Six hundred pages, and the middle third is a forced march through chemotherapy trials: acronym after acronym, regimen after regimen, advances measured in months. The biography conceit thins whenever the science thickens, and the history told is almost entirely American medicine's. A great book that is also a textbook in places, and it never warns you which chapter is which.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
