The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

In 1997, a woman named Phyllis Clauson wrote to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to tell researchers her brother, the original “Jimmy” of the Jimmy Fund, was not dead, as many presumed. Instead, her brother, Einar Gustafson, was a truck driver in Maine with three children. Karen Cummings in the development office received the letter, noticed from its details that it was not a fake as other “Jimmy” sightings had been, and contacted Clauson. When Cummings first met Einar near Boston and then went up to Maine, where he showed her the uniform the Boston Braves had given him years before, she knew he was bona fide. He returned to the Dana-Farber for a visit nearly 50 years after he received his childhood cancer treatment.

Cancer creates the sense of a world one will never escape, similar to the way Primo Levi described concentration camps. It was certainly this type of world for Carla and for the author’s other patients. Even on the day his daughter, Leela, is born, Mukherjee cuts the baby’s umbilical cord to harvest stem cells that might help his patients. Suddenly, he finds that many of his patients, like Carla, are able to survive cancer.