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Mukherjee 'delighted' his book among top 100 best non-fiction -
Washington, Aug 30, 2011: Indian American Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee is "delighted" that his book on cancer has been listed 75th among Time magazine's "All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books" with President Barack Obama's autobiography in the third place.
The Delhi-born cancer specialist's book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" that made it to the Time magazine's top 10 non-fiction books of 2010 and The New York Times' top five list, figures fourth in the science section.
"I am delighted," Mukherjee, 41, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, who won the Pulizer in April, told IANS over the phone from New York where he practices.
Asked what he was writing now he said, "It's still in the works" and "It's too early to tell" what it's about.
Mukherjee, who had his schooling at New Delhi's St. Columba's School, where he was five years junior to Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, said then he began writing the book to explain what's cancer to a patient who told him she was willing to go on fighting but she needed to know what she was battling.
In choosing "the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine," the influential weekly notes Mukherjee's first book "is also one of the best-written, most accessible, most relevant science books ever penned."
The science section is topped by "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking (72nd place).
The list is topped by "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein with Obama's first memoir "Dreams from My Father" placed third.
"Even if Obama hadn't ended up in the White House, Dreams from My Father would still be a compelling and beautifully written American story about the son of a black man and a white woman, his search for his African father and how he found a "workable meaning for his life as a black American."
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Indian American Siddhartha Mukherjee bags Pulitzer
for his book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer".
Washington, April 19, 2011: Indian American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee has bagged this year's Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category for his book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer".
Delhi-born Mukherjee's book has been described as "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science".
The finalists in the category were "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain" by Nicholas Carr and "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History" by S.C. Gwynne.
An assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center, Mukherjee had told IANS in December last year: "Cancer is growing dramatically in certain parts of South Asia."
Mukherjee advocated a strong anti-smoking campaign and breast cancer screening to battle the growing incidence of the disease in India.
Less than a month after its publication, Mukherjee's book, published by Scribner, featured among "The 10 Best Books of 2010" in the New York Times Book Reviews Sunday, a rare feat for a work of non-fiction.
The doctor blamed increase in cancer in tobacco smoking as "clearly one culprit among young men and women".
"But there are other culprits too," he said. "As the population ages and other diseases are slowly eliminated, cancer begins to come about."
"Cancer rises in the double negative only when all the other killers have been killed. So I think that's beginning to occur in some parts of South Asia."
Mukherjee, 40, who grew up in New Delhi's Safdarjung Enclave, "immersed in reading and books" at home and studied at St. Columba's School, says he "came into oncology in a sort of reverse, in the sense that I first trained as a cellular biologist when I was in Oxford as a Rhodes scholar".
"So I really came from the cell into medicine. Many people first train in medicine, then eventually get fascinated by cells."
The book isn't meant for the medical profession alone, he said. "The target is everyone. The point of this book was to make this world of medicine and science and culture accessible to anyone who is interested," Mukherjee told IANS.
"This is a disease that has developed in our times in a very poignant way. So I intend this book to be read by anyone who wishes to find out about it: patients and people whose loved ones are affected by cancer or any person interested in its history."....IANS/NRIpress.com
http://www.nripress.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&rd=&id=62268:Indian-American-Siddhartha-Mukherjee-bags-Pulitzer&catid=69:top-ians-headlines
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BIO
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbytarian Hospital. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School.
His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. Mukherjee trained in cancer medicine at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard Medical School and was on the staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as the New York Times and the New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000
. He lives in Boston and New York with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and with his daughter, Leela. His father was an executive in Mitsubishi and mother was a teacher
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- He ia an oncologist by training, an MD and a PhD. He is a cancer doctor and hence treat patients with cancer.
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2010:
Best Book of the Month: The Emperor of All Maladies
"In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer." With this sobering statistic, physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee begins his comprehensive and eloquent "biography" of one of the most virulent diseases of our time. An exhaustive account of cancer's origins, The Emperor of All Maladies illustrates how modern treatments--multi-pronged chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, as well as preventative care--came into existence thanks to a century's worth of research, trials, and small, essential breakthroughs around the globe. While The Emperor of All Maladies is rich with the science and history behind the fight against cancer, it is also a meditation on illness, medical ethics, and the complex, intertwining lives of doctors and patients. Mukherjee's profound compassion--for cancer patients, their families, as well as the oncologists who, all too often, can offer little hope--makes this book a very human history of an elusive and complicated disease. --Lynette Mong
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