Facing Our Modern Day Grendel, a Recommendation of The Emperor of All Maladies: The Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

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Recommended: Essay on cancer in english

In recommending an award winning, non-fiction text for our English class, I decided to base my selections on the following personal criteria: the texts should be appealing, informative, engaging and life transforming to readers. Based on these personal criteria along with those given by our instructor, I came up with the following top three picks; The first text is Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys And The Dawn Of a New America, by Gilbert King. The second text is The Year of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, by Saul Friedländer and my third pick is, The Emperor of All Maladies: The Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. While all three texts meet my criteria, we were instructed to recommend just a text. The Emperor of All Maladies will be my top pick as I find it to be the most likely life transforming and engaging text of the three based on reviews of the texts. It is also the least likely text one will find in an English class, which makes it even more interesting.

According to a recent statistic by Canadian Cancer Society, an estimated 187,600 new cancer cases will be diagnosed in 2013 and about 75,500 are expected to die from it. Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada, accounting for about 30% of all death. Children are not exempted from the evil that this unrelenting foe of our society is perpetrating. In reviewing “The Emperor of All Maladies”, reviewer Alexander Linklater noted Harold Varmus while accepting his Nobel prize for the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes in 1989, turned to Beowulf: "We have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways – ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal se...

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...rver, 16 September. 2007. Web. 24 November 2013.
King, Gilbert, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys And The Dawn Of a New America. Harper, 2012. Print.
Linklater, Alexander. Rev. of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The Observer, 23 January. 2011. Web. 24 November. 2013
Mukherjee, Siddhartha The Emperor of All Maladies: The Biography of Cancer. Scribner, 2010. Print.
Taylor, Peter Shawn. Rev. of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys And The Dawn Of a New America, by Gilbert King. Library Book Review, 24 November. 2013.
Tzu, Sun. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1771.Sun_Tzu November 24, 2013.
Weiner, Jonathan.“The Mind of a Disease.” Rev. of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The New York Times, November 12, 2010.
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