By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : Indian American Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book on cancer has been listed 75th among Time magazine’s “All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books” with President Barack Obama’s autobiography in the third place.
The Delhi-born cancer specialist’s book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” that made it to the Time magazine’s top 10 non-fiction books of 2010 and The New York Times’ top five list, figures fourth in the science section.
The section is topped by “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking (72nd place).
In choosing “the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME … magazine,” the influential weekly notes Mukherjee’s first book “is also one of the best-written, most accessible, most relevant science books ever penned”.
When he won the Pulizer in April, Mukherjee, 41, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, told IANS that he thought of writing the book after one of his patients who had stomach cancer told him she was willing to go on fighting but she needed to know what she was battling.
Mukherjee, who had his schooling at New Delhi’s St.Columba’s School, where he was five years junior to Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, said then he began writing the book as he couldn’t point her to one thing that could explain cancer.
“Essentially, it was a long process. I wrote it in little bits and pieces and it took about seven years,” Mukherjee said.
The Time list is topped by “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” by Gertrude Stein with Obama’s first memoir “Dreams from My Father” placed third.
“Even if Obama hadn’t ended up in the White House, Dreams from My Father would still be a compelling and beautifully written American story about the son of a black man and a white woman, his search for his African father and how he found a “workable meaning for his life as a black American.”
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])