![]() Mukherjee decided to write a history of cancer when a terminally ill patient asked him a simple question: could he explain exactly "what it is I'm battling?" But as Mukherjee immersed himself in research, the disease quickly began to assume the characteristics of a personality, and so cancer's historian became its biographer. Mukherjee's impression of reluctant ownership of his own success is, I suspect, down to a profound sense of personal insignificance in the face of his subject's enormity. ![]() ![]() Soon, though, I realise that is not it either. Then I think, no, of course, the poor man must just be so accustomed by now to the carousel of plaudits and prizes and media demands, he has reached the glaze of autopilot. Yet when Siddhartha Mukherjee talks about his book, it is with a striking air of disinterested detachment. ![]() Published a year ago, the Emperor of All Maladies has won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction, been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award, and named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year by the New York Times, Time magazine and Oprah Winfrey the sort of success that soars beyond the wildest heights of literary ambition into the stratosphere of fantasy. ![]()
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