The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Cancer is bad. I know that. My mom has been fighting cancer (and I mean, honestly, fighting—fighting as if she is sword fighting, fighting as if she is wrestling, fighting as if she is boxing—fighting cancer
for the past ten years).



Mukherjee shows the horror of attempting to fight cancer. It's a fearsome opponent. It can appear beaten yet suddenly it can appear again, this time stronger than ever. It causes horrific pain. It has to be fought with poison and radiation that battle the cancer by killing the body.



I liked this book a lot. I did well in following all the medical terms until I hit the chapters that spoke of c-myc genes and ras and Rb in the last quarter of the book. My head began to swivel. I read on. I could feel my brain spinning. I pushed to the end, though I wasn't terribly clear about what I was reading. Way, way over my head.



My final assessment: I wish there'd been an editor to make the last parts of the book more readable for the layman like me. Up until that point, I'd loved the book enough to wish it had been nominated for the best nonfiction of 2010.