Name: Cesarz wszech chorób
Rating: 4.35064935064935 (77 reviews)
ISBN: 9788375365443

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Wydawnictwo Czarne

Agnieszka Pokojska

Jan Dzierzgowski

A "biography" of cancer from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. A combination of medical history, cutting-edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms the listener's understanding of cancer and much of the world around them. The author provides a glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers, and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

biografia raka

Cesarz wszech chorób

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha 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 five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. 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.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased 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. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

A Biography of Cancer

The Emperor of All Maladies

Stephanie Aaron

I was disappointed in this book. I found it to be too long, unorganized, and rambling.

Greg Talbot

"It's palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope - William Castle, describing leukemia, 1580 Gleaming with rich detail in history, medical science, pubic policy and the innovators who got us here, Mukherjee delivers a glorious work. Early descriptions in papyrus describe sarcomas. Hippocrates would be credited to the name cancer, named after Karakinos ( greek for crab), naming it after the crab shaped tumor. The book linearly takes us through the scientific breakthroughs of cancer. What a strange dark world surgery had to have been in the early enlightenment. Books like "Morbid Anatomy" detail the radical mastectomy and removal of those tumors. All and all a good reminder that as barbaric as cancer treatment may seem today, it's still worlds better than it use to be. Significant parts of the book are about events within the last 70 years. This can be chalked up to the antibiotics in the 1940s, the awareness of wound care and infection, Farber's discovery of antifloates and finding remissions of cancer and the political rumblings that would start the National Cancer Institute Act during Roosevelt's administration. If the 1940s and 1950s gave us the pioneers and footwork for ways to think about cancer and its treatments. Admirable work by Mary Laskar in public policy and raising money for research is well documented. Treating Spanish flu ridden hospital wards and losing her husband Albert to cancer gave her an endless drive to move from palliative to curative cancer research. Her "moonshot" campaigning for a U.S. initiative to tackle cancer from a national level significantly informed the public about cancer. My favorite part of the book was on the tobacco industry fighting the public, and smearing science and any indictment of Big Tobacco and its cytotoxic products. Just a brilliant part of the book, and possible blueprint for understanding how corporations attempt to distance themselves from their responsibilities. Cancer is describes as lurking in the shadows. Starting quiet and local, before fulminating and metastasizing elsewhere. "The Emperor of Maladies" brilliantly informs and describes this 4000 year journey of identifying and battling against cancer. Even some of the most virulent forms of cancer can be remedied or at least ameliorated. Being that cancer is a mutation of good biology, it is in some ways always tied to us. But a deeper truth is that through knowledge we can fight it, and in spite of hardship our spirit indomitable.

An assessment of cancer addresses both the courageous battles against the disease and the misperceptions and hubris that have compromised modern understandings, providing coverage of such topics as ancient-world surgeries and the development of present-day treatments. Reprint. Best-selling winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Includes reading-group guide.

charisa

can you believe i used to read nonfiction part 2

Gavin

Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.


(Swinburne)

Quite lyrical but exhausting. All the way from Galen to personal oncogenetics.

The section on pre-anesthesia radical surgery was truly nauseating. A horrendous macho fad:

  Haagensen wrote in 1956: 'it is my duty to carry out as radical an operation as the... anatomy permits.'

The radical mastectomy had... edged into the “ultraradical,” an extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall, and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle, and the lymph nodes inside the chest.

Breast cancer, [Halsted] claimed, spun out from the breast into the lymph nodes under the arm, then cartwheeled mirthlessly through the blood into the liver, lungs, and bones. A surgeon’s job was to arrest that centrifugal spread by cutting every piece of it out of the body, as if to catch and break the wheel in midspin. This meant treating early breast cancer aggressively and definitively. The more a surgeon cut, the more he cured.


The sheer amount of money and genius thrown at cancer - with merely gradual returns - is not really considered in terms of its opportunity cost, by Mukherjee of anyone - what diseases might we have cured with those hundreds of billions? What giant, clever prevention studies run? But never mind: cancer won the PR war (against apathy, against political indifference, against more cost-effective causes) very early on, with the chemo pioneer Farber and his use of Jimmy

  The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans—the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically.


and later with the powerful patient blocs.

Not sure who would benefit from reading this closely; there's too much detail. Maybe med school freshers?

Story telling imbued with history, data, and perspective. A truly enlightening read!

Matthew Serrano

Hazal Özlem

** spoiler alert **
           Bazı durumların, uygulamaların ve kabullerin yüzyıllar içinde dahi değişmediği, bazılarınınsa neredeyse anlık hızla değişebildiğini; tıbbın ve bir onkoloğun gözünden okumak heyecan verici. Kanser ile katettiğimizi sandığımız yolun bir arpa boyundan çok olmadığını ve gelecekte her iki kişiden birinin kanserle savaşacağı öğrenince korkmamak, hüzünlenmemek elde değil. Mükemmel bir kitap.

Flavia Louise

4.5 stars
I always have trouble rating nonfiction books because of my rating system being so based on how much I enjoy a book. But I did actually enjoy this and it was just VERY interesting.

Ashley Zahalan

Good read. Excellent telling of how far cancer research has come. 

ANDREW BRYK

I say I enjoy most books but this one was truly incredible. Using both research and personal stories, the author is able to tell a story that will change the way you think about disease and cancer in particular. There were definitely aspects that I did not understand as I am not in the medical field but it is a must read nonetheless

Jeni Enjaian

I enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would. I found myself absolutely fascinated by all the topics Mukherjee mentioned. Cancer, as he describes, is not just one static disease. Both the disease-and all its forms-and the treatments take such wide varied form, it's hard to imagine how Mukherjee crammed as much as he did into this book without overwhelming the reader.

That last fact, in my opinion, was both an advantage and a disadvantage. I'll start with the negative first. It was so vast Mukherjee often had to jump back and forth in the time line as he discussed each successive advance in prevention and/or treatment. I'm sure that it would have been more obvious had I read this book in print rather than as an audiobook. Another disadvantage due to the format? Mukherjee's frequent lapses into personal anecdotes, which, while appropriate, were often disconcerting in the shift from third to first person.

Here's the advantage. Mukherjee mastered all the various themes and topics he crammed into this book without overwhelming the reader, a supremely impressive feat. The science alone could easily overwhelm the average reader. It's no wonder Mukherjee won the Pulizter.

Phil James

I found this supremely well written, balanced between the smooth telling of a suspense (who-done-it?) and just enough grounding in science history to keep both strands readable. 
He kept the human context alive with the patients he followed and he showed humility in the way he never presumed to be more than a learner even after he became a qualified specialist.
The best science books are those that kindle the feeling of awe at life and the universe. Here there is awe at the perseverance of many to find cures and even awe at the incredible wily supreme survivor, the disease itself.
The only reason I didn't give 5-stars was because there wasn't enough of the patients perspectives, but perhaps I'm being unfair, the subtitle is "a biography of Cancer" after all.

Cesarz wszech chorób biografia raka

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