Title: Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Author: John Green
Publisher: Crash Course Books 2025
Genre: Nonfiction - Science, History
Pages: 208
Rating: 5/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf; Nonfiction Reader
Where I Got It: Preordered in 2025!
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
I really appreciate John Green’s ability to weave hard science and history with emotional human stories and somehow not make it seem trite or manipulative. We get a comprehensive history of tuberculosis, its place in society, and current state. We get some beautiful and tragic human stories weaving in and out. I really loved hearing personal stories of dealing with the disease. Along the way, Green also includes his own commentary about his obsession with tuberculosis. I absolutely loved this short book.
Next up on the TBR pile:
