![]() But Mukherjee also mines Tony Judt's Postwar and Lewis Carroll's poems. In an ambitious survey volume like this, we hope to meet Susan Sontag's essays and perhaps a snippet from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward. The literary threads in this book glint with evocation. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering.” “To name an illness is to describe a certain condition of suffering––a literary act before it becomes a medical one. “Even an ancient monster needs a name,” Mukherjee observes. He could diagnose it but, he wrote, “there is no treatment.” In the Egypt of 2500 BC, the physician Imhotep had a hieroglyph for cancer. Reading it provides essential context, and a critical dose of humility.Ĭancer is an old disease it appears on the papyrus of the earliest written human records. ![]() Find a copy of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee's small miracle of insight, scope, pace, structure and lucidity. An outfit called the Union for International Cancer Control urged people to visit a web site and sign the World Cancer Declaration. Today, NBCC board member Karen Long discusses nonfiction finalist Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Simon & Schuster). ![]() Each day leading up to the March 10 announcement of the 2010 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty-one finalists (to read other entries in the series, click here). ![]()
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