India-born American doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee's debut book dissecting the dreaded disease of cancer has been rated among the 10 best books of
2010 by the New York Times.
Mukherjee's "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," published in November this year is ranked third among five non-fiction books in the list that will be released on December 12, according to the US daily.
The oncologist "excavates the deep history of the 'war' on cancer, weaving haunting tales of his own clinical experience with sharp sketches of the sometimes heroic, sometimes misguided scientists who have preceded him in the fight," describes the Times.
Calling it Mukherjee's magisterial "biography" of the most dreaded of modern afflictions, the daily says the book "is a history of eureka moments and decades of despair."
Mukherjee describes vividly the horrors of the radical mastectomy which got more and more radical, until it arrived at "extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the
axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, part of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes in the chest.
The daily says, "Mukherjee has undertaken one of the most extraordinary stories in medicine: a history of cancer which will kill more than seven million people around the planet.
The Indian-American doctor began writing the book when he began advanced training in cancer medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in 2009.
The reviewer of the daily describes the book as "an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan."
"Apollo's Angels :A History of Ballet" by Jenifer Homans and "Cleopatra: A life" by Stacy Schiff made it to the first two positions in the Times list of non fiction while "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen topped the Fiction list of
books in 2010.