The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

You know the feeling that you get when you're done reading a book on the subject and realize how it changed your understanding of the field dramatically? Such as Feynman's Lectures on Physics, A Brief History of Time, or The Emperor's New Mind? This magnificent treatise on cancer is just what the subject needed - a meticulous, no-holds-barred treatment that reveals a plethora of information on cancer, and our ancient, never-ending war with it - a constantly shape-shifting enemy whose root is ourselves.
Mukherjee describes in eye-watering detail how our understanding of cancer has changed in around four thousand years, and how the landscape of the ‘War Against Cancer' has undergone multiple paradigm shifts - from the witch-doctors who thought the best cure for the then-unnamed disease was crab soup; to current efforts, which are a mixture of chemotherapy and targeted drugs, some of which can almost erase certain cancers from its roots.
Absolutely no detail is withheld from the reader - the politics, the money, the legal battles over potential cures and clinical trials, the innumerable doctors involved, the patients whose lives were altered with the onset of the disease, and how each potential drug worked (or why it stopped working).
Mukherjee also focuses on how patients embrace their sickness as the new normal, and how some patients accept death easier than doctors - his work is, above all, a testimony to the tenacity and resilience of the human spirit.
In conclusion, although this might not be the most readable book, it is definitely one of the most sobering books I have ever encountered. A must-read.