What I got from Amazon Black Friday sales

About one month ago I checked out (from Carnegie Library) Vincent DeVita Jr.’s The Death of Cancer that rekindled my interest in the history of medicine, in this case the history of cancer, and that led me to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.  I am currently on the waiting list of this book on the OverDrive—Carnegie Library or libraries across the country ebook borrowing.

I apparently couldn’t wait and bought these two books, taking advantage of Amazon’s Black Friday’s book sale. The books arrived today.  I almost finished reading The Death of Cancer.  Many of the books I bought were the ones I checked out from libraries.  This is the reason why I do not always read the books I bought.  But this is the book I need to own.

Many years ago Janice first introduced Atul Gawande to me, it was his Better, and I have since read his Complications, The Checklist Manifesto, Being Mortal. Now I am introducing Siddhartha Mukherjee to Janice; it will be well worth her while.

I recently discovered another immigrant-author in medical field (both Gawande and Mukherjee are from India; Gawande is the child of an immigrant urologist). Mukherjee is Stanford U., Oxford U. and Harvard Medical School/MGH trained immunologist-oncologist.  He worked in Paul Berg’s Lab while an undergraduate at Stanford.

I am currently going through the archives of articles in Scientific American in the field of the advance of cancer treatments.  I came across this article of “Leukemia”, written by Dr. Emil Frei and Dr. Emil Freireich (about whom I am writing a post) on the issue of May 1, 1964. Who would have more knowledge and insight to leukemia than these two pioneer oncologists in 1960s?  They shared the 1972 Lasker Awards (the American Nobel) in 1972.

Dr. Emil Frei was the uncle of one of our good friends, through whose kind arrangement, Janice, during her freshman year, was fortunate to be invited to a party hosted by Dr. (and Mrs.) Emil Frei, who was then physician-in-chief at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

In addition to these two books, what I got from Amazon Black Friday “Fire Sale” was Kindle Fire HD 8; the third Kindle I have; two are still on active duty, not mentioning iPad, mini iPad and iPhone.  With more than half of my readings are on various devices nowadays, I still cannot part with the joy of buying print books, not that I will read all of them.