Book Rec Tuesday - The Emperor of All Maladies (A Biography of Cancer)

I'm so thankful during quarantine for my love of reading. I'd probably be losing my mind if there weren't so many good books in my lineup.

The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee has been on my list for a long time, I love medical books that are comprised of stories. They're the best way to learn in my opinion. My boyfriend actually picked this one up at Barnes and Noble on one of our dates before I got around to it!! I've been waiting for him to finish it since so that I could get my hands on it.

I sort of thought it might be kind of dry and boring, but it's anything but! It's a dark chunk of history that we don't learn in school but that's such a fundamental piece of society. It goes back to mentions of tumors from ancient Egyptian texts, through the development of surgeries that are barbaric by today's standards and into a bit of the politics of research. Mukherjee follows a story of his own client throughout - he's a cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. Oh yeah, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize.

I was so amazed by his basic way of describing how some of the drugs work that was honestly better told than what we were taught in pharmacy school. For anyone in any sort of medical profession I highly recommend, if not simply for a more complete education on cancer.  For everyone else I recommend it for the beauty of the journey and a better understanding of what cancer patients go through, the vigorous rounds of chemo and radiation that bring a person to the edge of existence and back.