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Recommended Books

Over the years we have found that people can benefit from reading about other peoples experiences with CML. This page lists a number of books that have been recommended by our members.

If you have read any books which you have found were particularly helpful in your understanding of this disease and/or what it is like to live with CML, please contact us so we can include your recommendations here. The links to the books on this page lead directly to Amazon UK where we have an affiliate account. This means Amazon will donate 10% of the price of each sale to CML Support Group. If you plan to buy any books featured here please make sure you click the links below to help with funding our charity.

Faces of Courage and Hope introduces the faces and cancer journeys of 16 patients with CML. Men and women of different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds, each share their unique experience in coping with life-altering circumstances and how they refocused their lives. 


The Philadelphia Chromosome chronicles the remarkable change of fortune for the more than 70,000 people worldwide who are diagnosed with CML each year. It is a celebration of a rare triumph in the battle against cancer and a blueprint for future research, as doctors and scientists race to uncover and treat the genetic roots of a wide range of cancers.


 

In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out ‘war against cancer’. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteeth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.

Riveting and magesterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

Last modified: 
18 September 2015