Indian doctor’s book on cancer get shortlisted for US award
PTI: Siddhartha Mukherjee, a New York-based physician’s biography of cancer, “The Emperor of All Maladies” has been shortlisted in the non-fiction category for US’ prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award 2010.
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given in six categories — fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry, to promote the finest books and reviews published in English.
The winners will be announced on March 10.
In “The Emperor of All Maladies”, published by HarperCollins India, the researcher and award winning science writer examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion.
Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.
From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the 19th-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, “The Emperor of All Maladies” is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.
The other titles in the non-fiction category are: “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” by Barbara Demick; “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American” by S C Gwynne; Jennifer Homans”s “Apollo”s Angels: A History of Ballet” and “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America”s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson.
Among the finalists for fiction are two books in translation, including Israeli David Grossman”s “To the End of the Land” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” by Hans Keilson, a German Jew who survived the war by hiding in Holland.
