The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Subtitled "A Biography of Cancer," Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize winning tour de force combines an amazing amount of complex research with wonderfully clear writing. At 470 pages, it seems long, but there is enough drama and personality (of both patients and scientists) to keep the reader involved. I think of it as a "history" of cancer, but the author probably chose the word "biography" because of the way cancer seems uncannily human in its behavior. As he puts it on page 388, "Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves." The book gradually delves into the "pathological mitosis" that is cancer and winds up with descriptions of the contemporary genetics inspiring drugs that intervene with runaway cell replication. An excellent book and good read.