In my early teens, my father was diagnosed with throat cancer. I don’t remember too much but it changed everything. We had to leave our lives behind in San Jose and move back down to Southern California to be with family.

I cannot help but harken back to this experience - what little memory I have of it - when reading through this book. This is the second time I am reading this, revisiting it 6 years after my first read through.

This book is as much a biography of a living organism as Master of the Senate was. Cancer is a single word, but a family of characters. Throughout the book, Mukherjee weaves his way between two story threads. One is the story of medicine’s struggle with this greatest of all diseases and the second is the story of one of Mukherjee’s modern patients Carla. Slowly, they dance closer and closer together until they interwine in a single beautiful moment. I won’t say how it ends.

I love the colorful cast of characters playing their part in the epic fight against cancer. Some of these people were the brightest of the bright - Harvard, Yale, and UCSF grads with distinguished pedigrees. It is funny how that the book seems to build those guys up only to have them dash themselves against the puzzle that is cancer. Much of the “scientific dogma that has sent us into the wrong directions against cancer - wasting lives and dollars - seemed to have been crafted with the greatest confidence by these intellectual titans.

But also there were the little guys. The researchers who labored in obscurity for decades - one even sold carpets for a little while - until their brief moment they step out of the morass of the crowd to cement their own small stone into the rising wall against cancer. These are absolutely brilliant men and women who push together against doubt and dogma, pulling that thread to find that small single truth towards beating cancer.

I felt throughout the entire story that the defeat of cancer had been elevated into the worthiest cause. The most memorable foe. The greatest castle. And that the people who played a part in that fight were elevated and purified for that. Is this lionization justified? Well in my belief, it is. After all, it is the emperor of all maladies.

Out of my first read in 2011, I felt exhausted by the brutality of the “war” against cancer. I viscerally sympathized with the unnamed foot soldiers in the battle - the thousands of women who subjected themselves to radical, disfiguring mastectomies or the children who would try this amazing new treatment that works only to then “relapse” - their ultimate fates unmentioned but not difficult to imagine. I came out of this book, traumatic.

It has been 6 years since, and re-reading it now, I do not feel the trauma as much anymore. In fact, I feel optimistic and even a bit hopeful. I am not sure why I don’t feel as deeply for the casualties this time. Am I less emotionally sensitive this time around? Have I grown more to appreciate the bigger picture, one of arduously won progress? I don’t know. To think that I am now more callous towards human life is a little disturbing. I don’t know.

What has not changed is the score. 5 out of 5. I highly recommend this book to anyone whose lives has been touched by cancer.

I read through 4 great books in January. Let’s hope February is just as fruitful.