A Detailed, Informative “Biography” of a Monstrous Illness

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner, 2010, 592pp.)

Cancer is one of America’s most feared illnesses. It attacks suddenly and indiscriminately, and many of the treatments for it are just as deadly as the affliction itself. Mukherjee covers both the social and medical history of this subject. Up until the latter half of the twentieth century, cancer survival was seen as a battle to be fought in private. During the 1950s, as the author informs us, the very word “cancer” was considered too indecent to appear in print. A cancer physician himself, Mukherjee examines the illness not so much from a clinical perspective, but from a “human” one. How long has it been around? More importantly, how can it be cured? These are only a few of the questions that the author tackles in language that is both informative and easy to understand.

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Excellent Book, but Tough to Read

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman (Picador, 2010, 496pp.)

In 1942, 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrendered to the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippine Islands, and were forced to make a brutal trek to the nearest POW camp. The Bataan Death March, as it became known, stands testament to humanity’s saga of never-ending cruelty—and kindness. Several years in the making, Tears in the Darkness is an excellent work, covering events before and after the death march. In addition to interviewing American and Filipino soldiers, the authors also talked to Filipino civilians who risked their lives to aid the POWs along the way, as well as consulting former Japanese soldiers to provide vital insight into the Japanese psyche of the 1940s.

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The Dark Side of Post-WWII America

Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II by Thomas Childers (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, 340pp.)

Although PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is normally attributed to veterans of the Vietnam War, this is a false assumption. Childers entwines the stories of three American GIs and their families—including his own—in this grim portrait of the Greatest Generation’s return from World War II. The violence of battle inflicted both physical and psychological wounds, leaving many veterans to struggle with PTSD, nightmares, and survivor’s guilt, while their bewildered wives found that the men they welcomed home were irrevocably changed from the men they had married. This account of PTSD, broken families and stormy marriages is dark and depressing, but informative and well worth the read.