Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com.
November's Read of the Month
The Song of the Cell By Siddhartha Mukherjee
In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. He seduces you with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling. Told in six parts, laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate—a masterpiece.
Siddhartha's Recommended Reads
Check out some of Siddhartha Mukherjee's favorite books and read why he loved them so much!
The Candy House
By Jennifer Egan
I absolutely love how Egan revives characters from her prior book and makes them central to this new book. The prose is sparkling, and Egan’s adventurous writing makes this book a modern masterpiece.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
By Richard Rhodes
A classic work of non-fiction, Rhodes’ book is monumental and deeply researched. He has the unique capacity to bring the reader deep into the physical realm of the Los Alamos lab, or, equally, into the abstract mental realm of the minds of physicists who dream of splitting the atom. And then, he writes of the political, social and human consequences of the bombing with majesty and compassion.
Being Mortal
By Atul Gawande
Gawande’s book is humane and compassionate. He confronts death and dying as a physician and a son, and leaves us with a haunting and illuminating picture of what it means to die in our times.
Midnight's Children
By Salman Rushdie
A classic for all times, Rushdie’s book inspired a thousand new voices across the world. I remember reading it as a young man and learning how to wield language as an acrobatic tool.
Changing My Mind
By Zadie Smith
I have a secret love of essays, and Smith’s essays (far from “occasional”) are among my favorite. She ranges widely – art, music, poetry – combining her piercing insights with humor, elegance and incisiveness. I couldn’t stop reading this book.
More From Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor of All Maladies
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.
The Gene
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.