Mukherjee calls this great and beautiful book a biography, rather than a history, because he wants his reader to understand his subject not just as a disease, a scientific problem or a social condition, but as a character  an antagonist with a story to tell. His intensely vivid and precise descriptions of biological processes accumulate into a character, fully developed and eerily familiar. The notion of

"popular science" doesn't come close to describing this achievement. It is literature. Observer This is a riveting book&profound, eloquent and searching John Carey, Sunday Times The Emperor of All Maladies is the book that many will have been waiting for. This elegantly written overview allows us to look a once whispered-about illness squarely in the eye. Independent So beautifully written; this is literature, not popular science. The Emperor of Maladies empowers us, makes it clear that we really do know this enemy, and so brings us another step closer to victory. Evening Standard Mukherjee never condescends, yet he manages to write lucidly and tellingly about complex experimental, technological and theoretical matters Will Self, New Statesman 'Siddhartha Mukherjee has done something that should not have been possible: he has managed, at once, to write an authoritative history of cancer for the general reader, while always keeping the experiences of cancer patients in his heart and in his narrative. At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of all Maladies is that rarest of things - a noble book.' David Rieff, author of Swimming in a Sea of Death 'Sid Mukherjee's book is a pleasure to read, if that is the right word. Cancer today is widely regarded as the worst of all the diseases from which one might suffer - if only because it is fast becoming the most common. Dr. Mukherjee explains how this perception came about, how cancer has been regarded across the years and what is now being done to treat its protean forms. His book is the clearest account I have read on this subject. With The Emperor of all Maladies, he joins that small fraternity of practicing doctors who cannot just talk about their profession but write about it.' Tony Judt, author of Postwar and III Fares the Land Rarely have the science and poetry of illness been so elegantly braided together as they are in this erudite, engrossing, kind book. Mukherjee's clinical wisdom never erases the personal tragedies which are its occasion; indeed, he locates with meticulous clarity and profound compassion the beautiful hope buried in cancer's ravages. Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon