Indian American's book on cancer wins Pulitzer

Boston, Apr 18 (PTI) Indian-American physician
Siddhartha Mukherjee's acclaimed book on cancer, 'The Emperor
of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,' has won the
prestigious 2011 Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction
category.
According to the Pulitzer citation, the book by the
New York-based cancer physician and researcher is "an elegant
inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history
of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs,
still bedevils medical science".
The Pulitzer for general non-fiction is awarded to a
"distinguished and appropriately documented book of nonfiction
by an American author that is not eligible for consideration
in any other category".
It carries a USD 10,000 award.
India-born Mukherjee is an assistant professor of
medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician
at Columbia University Medical Centre.
A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford
University, University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School.
He has published articles in Nature, The New England
Journal of Medicine, The New York Times and The New Republic.
In his book, Mukherjee recounts centuries of
discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the
"eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits
against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three
decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out
war against cancer".
An award-winning science writer, Mukherjee examines
cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's
perspective and a biographer's passion.
The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent
chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished
from—for more than 5,000 years.
The "riveting, urgent and surprising" book reads like
a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.
It is a profoundly humane "biography" of cancer — from
its first documented appearances thousands of years ago
through the epic battles in the 20th century to cure, control,
and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.
"From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut
off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients
of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee's own
leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about
the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding
regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding
of this iconic disease," according to information on the book
on Pulitzer's website.
The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the
future of cancer treatments besides providing hope and clarity
to those seeking to demystify cancer.