Online Seminar Series: The Emperor of All Maladies

Online Contemporary Issues Seminar Series

The Emperor of All Maladies – A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Saturday, December 20, 2025

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From the author – “In a sense, this is a military history—one in which the adversary is formless, timeless, and pervasive. Here, too, there are victories and losses, campaigns upon campaigns, heroes and hubris, survival and resilience—and inevitably, the wounded, the condemned, the forgotten, the dead. In the end, cancer truly emerges, as a nineteenth-century surgeon once wrote in a book’s frontispiece, as “the emperor of all maladies, the king of terrors.”

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The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction: the jury called it “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal”. The Guardian wrote that “Mukherjee manages to convey not only a forensically precise picture of what he sees, but a shiver too, of what he feels.” Literary Review commended Mukherjee’s narrative: “It is so well written, and the science is so clearly explained, that it reads almost like a detective story—which, of course, it is.” We invite you to this monthly offering, reading several chapters each time.

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December 20 Reading:

Part Two – An Impatient War – An Anatomist’s Tumor, An Army on the March, The Cart and the Horse, A Moon Shot for Cancer

(pages 151-190)

Scribner; Reprint edition (August 2011)

ISBN 978-1439170915

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Schedule:

12:00-1:30PM PDT

Tutor: 

Andy Gilman

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Location: 

Online. Register to receive the link.