The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

An Amazon Best Book of November 2022: Song of the Cell is a feat of storytelling. Siddhartha Mukherjee seamlessly pulls together personal anecdotes, little-known history (including a massive feud between two pancreatic experts with all the drama of Hamilton ), and the latest health research. We know words like "hormones" and "liver," but Mukherjee makes us truly understand how they function, and where they fit into our body as a whole. The name of the book describes how cells make the "symphony" of our body, all the disparate functions that work to keep us alive (and how they break down as we approach death). I even learned more about COVID, despite feeling like we’ve read it all. This is a book that deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully, to revel in the awe of the human body that comes through in every word written by Mukherjee, also the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , and a practicing physician and researcher. When it comes to the body, Mukherjee says: “We have learned so much. We have so much left to learn.” A philosophical take on the body, and life. —Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor Praise for Song of the Cell “This expansive, immersive book posits a new way forward in medicine thanks to the cell: new ways of treating patients, new medicines to create, new ways of healing, and new ways of understanding ourselves.” — Jaime Rochelle Herndon, Columbia Magazine “In an account that’s both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes.” —The New Yorker "Erudite, panoramic… Mukherjee is an elegant stylist… [and] an assured and genial guide." —Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star-Tribune “If you are not already in awe of biology, The Song of the Cell might get you there. It is a masterclass.” —Suzanne O’Sullivan, The Guardian “Audacious...mesmerizing…reliably engaging... Mukherjee enthusiastically instructs and... delights—all the while hustling us across a preposterously vast and intricate landscape.” —David A Shaywitz, The Wall Street Journal “Mukherjee is a passionate, expert guide… He weaves together charming histories of scientists, his own, sometimes painful, memories of patients and friends lost to illness, and the complex science of what makes cells tick.” —Hannah Kuchler, The Financial Times “For anyone who wants to understand the building blocks of their own bodies—which everyone surely should—this is an informative and entertaining introduction.” —The Economist “Mukherjee has found an especially roomy subject for his roving intelligence. . . . I was repeatedly dazzled by [Mukherjee’s] pointillist scenes, the enthusiasm of his explanations, the immediacy of his metaphors.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “Mukherjee is such an engaging writer, alert to nanoscopic beauty and the potential deceptions of metaphor. . . . [ The Song of the Cell is] written with compassionate warmth and humor, and the personal glimpses into an ordinary scientific life and the dedication that goes with it.” —Steven Poole, The Telegraph “ The Song of the Cell blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner.” — Oprah Daily Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine . He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013 . Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature , The New England Journal of Medicine , Cell , The New York Times Magazine , and The New Yorker . He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com. Read more