lightreads

The Song of the Cell

4/5. Very good medical history and topic exploration under the broad umbrella of cellular biology. A lot of expected things here – IVF, cancer – but also some surprises and his usual elegance and humanism. Ignore the subtitle, it’s dumb publisher irrelevance.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Excellent. And exactly as a friend described it – "exhaustive, exhausting." This is pitched perfectly for me, the well-educated not-a-doctor. And like the very best nonfiction, this book is clearly written from a place of deep passion for the subject. He has the exact right balance here between cool, researcher's zeal, and human grasp of the "charring, personal war" each of his patients is fighting. This book made me tired and sad and amazed and hopeful and scared, and then everything all at once.

I've been reading a lot about cancer this year. I realized this just a minute ago, flipping back through reviews. Post processing, probably. But funnily enough, I wasn't thinking about my girlfriend while I was reading this. I don't know, for her, treatment was a series of gates to enter, pre-set paths to walk, tokens to collect. Have this surgery, starve yourself for a month, get irradiated in this precise way, do it again, do it again – no wait, psych, don't. It was like being passed from one set of highly competent hands to another and another in a baton race – everyone seemed to know exactly what ought to come next. This book isn't about those kinds of fights, as much.

Mostly I thought about B. How we used to sit together on my patio at night, knee-to-knee on the cement. Our guide dogs would curl up in front of us, tucked back-to-back, my sleek, creamy, fierce little girl lab and his giant, silly, shaggy black lab. He had retinal blastoma as a baby. They took out both eyes. I was only eight months out from my last eye surgery, I still have both eyes, but at that point it was more likely that I wouldn't, always. He talked me through his prosthetics, let me touch them, told me how one eye still hurt even though the doctors said it shouldn't. He was a drummer and a bit of a stoner; he wrote me strange emails sometimes in the middle of the night. He died before his twenty-third birthday. It took the cancer twenty years to catch up, but it got him.

This book is about his kind of cancer. His specific disease type, but also more broadly the type of cancer that becomes a companion. A lifelong companion, for however long life is. The kind that requires enormous creativity, endurance, brutality.

It's a very, very good book.




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