Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

Written by John Green

Narrated by John Green

Instant #1 New York Times bestseller! • #1 Washington Post bestseller! • #1 Indie Bestseller! • USA Today Bestseller!

John Green, acclaimed author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

“The real magic of Green’s writing is the deeply considerate, human touch that goes into every word.” –The Associated Press

″Told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author’s work.... This is the story of us.” –Slate

“Earnest and empathetic.” –The New York Times

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 18, 2025
• ISBN: 9798217082391

John Green

John Green attended a boarding school in Alabama not entirely unlike ALASKA’s Culver Creek. After graduating from college in 2000, he moved to Chicago, where is is a writer, editor and reviewer, as well as a regular contributor to public radio. LOOKING FOR ALASKA is his first novel.

Reviews for Everything Is Tuberculosis

[Carly Rabbit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Outstanding narration and information. Well worth the listen. Needed to look up some words.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Green focuses on one boy, Henry, who is fighting TB in Sierra Leone. His real experience is woven with the history of tuberculosis and the unbelievable impact it has had on our current culture, beauty standards, and healthcare system. I love seeing how Green, originally a YA fiction writer, has transitioned into writing books that match his current interests. He manages to bring humanity to a topic that could feel sterile or overly factual in less gifted hands. One of the things I loved best about this one is the exploration of stigmatizing the disease, both as an exclusion to society and as a glorified "artistic" disease depending on where you live. Like all of Green's work, its beauty lies in his understanding of both humanity's flaws and strengths.

[mickyfine · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

John Green delves into the history of tuberculosis and how this single disease shaped so much of our world and continues to be one of the leading causes of death globally. Framing this history of tuberculosis, is the story of Henry a teenaged tuberculosis patient that Green met while on a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019.

John Green is an excellent writer and he turns his tremendous talents here to exploring the history and present of a disease that has devastated so many lives. His decision to use Henry's story as a frame for delving into the realities of tuberculosis puts a human and relatable face on the realities of fighting this disease in the twenty-first century. In between Henry's story, Green explores the science of tuberculosis, its cultural impacts, and the ongoing fight to eliminate this curable disease that still kills millions every year. A powerful read that I strongly recommend.

[sennebec · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Informative, personal, passionate, and forcing the reader to make a good faith effort to wrap their head around the racial, social, and economic insanity that drives (or more correctly) impedes global efforts to treat this particular disease. An excellent thought provoker.

[hccpsk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Evidently, John Green has been obsessed with Tuberculosis since he met a young man named Henry at a hospital in Sierra Leone more than a decade ago. Lucky for readers, this obsession turned into Everything is Tuberculosis. Green masterfully mixes a personal narrative that includes his trip to Africa, his own medical struggles, the history of tuberculosis, TB treatments, political causes and ramifications surrounding the disease, Henry’s story, and a lot more. He packs a lot into a brief book while keeping the science understandable and the narrative moving briskly. Anyone wanting to learn more about the world’s successes and failures regarding the most deadly disease in human history should grab a copy.

[schmavery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd never read anything by John Green but had this recommended by a few people and was glad I took a look. I enjoyed many of the anecdotes and quotes that were used as analogies and motifs throughout the book.

It's a relatively quick and easy read, apart from a few emotional stories -- the author focuses on some specific people in an attempt to humanize the sufferers of TB. This becomes a fairly central theme, pushing to neither romanticize nor stigmatize the disease, both of which have happened plenty in its very long (I learned) history.

I recently read Abundance by Klein & Thompson, another popular non-fiction book this year, and found Everything Is Tuberculosis to be an interesting complement to it. Important to remember that achieving the vision of abundance in the "developed" world doesn't automatically mean those problems get solved everywhere.

[acargile-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had been reading so much sweet romance because I needed bibliotherapy, but I decided to read something of more substance. This novel was perfect. My brother had TB, but none of the rest of us got infected. Beyond scarred lungs, he's been fine. I assume he took medicine, but I was too young to remember.

The main idea is that TB can be cured. We have medicine for it; however, where the medicine is, the illness is not. Where the illness is, the medicine is not. Green tells of various people in history who contracted TB and follows Henry in Africa as he battles the disease in the 2000s. We learn about the prejudice against TB, which I didn't know about.

The novel is the perfect length. It doesn't overwhelm with information but gives enough historical background that it's really interesting. I'm not a huge non-fiction reader, but I try to read some because it's always worth it. Well, most of the time. I enjoyed meeting Henry, learning about TB in Sierra Leon, and seeing how much advancement has been made medically.

It's well worth one's time.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

John Green might be best known for his novels, including the highly successful The Fault in Our Stars, published in 2012. Green is also a very popular YouTuber on his own and in collaboration with his brother Hank. For the past few years he has used his public profile to become a global health advocate, specifically concerning tuberculosis, a disease that still kills over a million people every year. As Green puts it in Everything is Tuberculosis, “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”

This book is both a history of a devastating disease and a view of the present-day through the story of Henry, a young tuberculosis patient in Sierra Leone. Green exposes the inequities in the global healthcare system that often prevent those with the greatest need from receiving care. In 2023, Green personally spearheaded a campaign against Johnson & Johnson to allow manufacture of generic versions of their tuberculosis drug, reducing the cost of treatment so dramatically that it could finally be made available to poor countries and communities.

I learned a great deal from this book. The world needs more people like John Green to fight for those who cannot.

[renzomalo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some interesting facts and stories about man's battle with infectious diseases but tainted by some misinformation and a little too much "would'a, should'a, coulda' virtue signaling for my taste. Mr. Green stated that "tuberculosis made AIDS worse." Nonsense! AIDS disables the immune system so it was AIDS that made TB worse by destroying the bodies ability to defend itself. There's more but why bother.

[jetangen4571 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This very moving nonfiction account of one young man, his continent, and the disease that has always been there to depopulate and devastate which tried its very best to eliminate him. It is the rather global history of the disease itself and how politics to this very day has played too great a part in our failure to eradicate it. Please read this book in print, on screen, or listen to the audio!
#history #science #medicine #nonfiction #contagion #health #politics #ocd #respiratorydisease
@goodreads @bookbub @tantoraudio @librarythingofficial @barnesandnoble ***** Review #booksamillion #bookshop_org #bookshop_org_uk #kobo #Waterstones @penguinrandomhouse
@johngreenwritesbooks #audiobook #narratedbyauthor #crashcoursebooks

[clue_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Green's new book is exactly what the subtitle says it is. He writes near the end that he has been obsessed with the disease, and it's clear that he has been. He also writes near the end "I cannot take in what it means to lose 1,250,000 each year to a curable illness". It has been curable since the mid-twentieth century so think about that.

[melissarochelle_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great mix of personal and historical, local and global. Capitalism and the greed that seems inherent to living under this -ism is literally killing people.

Random aside: I was reminded of a storyline on The Bold and the Beautiful (a soap opera in the same world as The Young and the Restless) where a main character gets tuberculosis. I remember being very confused by this as a child because I thought it was a disease that didn't happen anymore and if it did, there was no cure, yet here was this woman living in Los Angeles WITH tuberculosis...and wait, consumption and tuberculosis are the same thing? I didn't understand how they were curing her when it was a disease that killed people. In my head, well, this is the end of Taylor, Ridge will devastated. But it wasn't, because it was CURABLE.

[kalliegrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I always love nonfiction from John Green, and this was excellent. It could certainly have been longer and more in-depth, but as a vehicle to get more people to care about these preventable deaths I think it's perfect.

[mm_jones · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From best-selling author John Greene, EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. Less than 200 pages, the book is fascinating, especially for someone who considered it a disease of the past.
In 1882, when Robert Koch identified the bacteria that caused the disease, it precipitated a profound shift from the idea of an inherited disease of intellect (consumption in English literature) to a contracted disease of filth in the racialization of tuberculosis.
Streptomycin became available in the mid-1940s. By the late 1950s, the illness was broadly curable.
Wonderful adventure read.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting and personal look at the history and current status of tuberculosis. Green's grandmother spent time in a sanitarium, so he has long been curious about it. He blended her story with that of a young man he met in Africa, and other interesting anecdotes.

This book is very readable and Green does an excellent job with the narration. I already knew a fair amount of the history here (but certainly not all of it), but I did not know much of the current status of TB, especially in other countries.

Green is a well-known YA author and I really hope this book introduces more readers to narrative nonfiction.

[shazjhb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book about TB. A personal story bringing back memories.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Am I grading on a curve because I love John Green's Crash Course History YouTube series, and this audiobook feels like an extended video? Sure I am.

But this is also a five star book because of the case it makes for the value of society's investment in long shots, in miracles, in deliberate actions to save one person. Because although one life is inconsequential in the history of the world, one life could be the whole world to us.

[lycomayflower · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am so enjoying John Green's shift into nonfiction. This is a short history of tuberculosis, both socially and medically, as well as a discussion of the state of TB treatment today. In short: if you live in a poor country, you're quite likely to contract it and your prognosis isn't great. AND it absolutely does not have to be this way. The cure exists. It just (mostly) isn't accessible in most of the places the disease is rampant. Green gives a truly excellent account of the state of things and points out where things are going wrong without being preachy. The interlaced small biography of a young man living with TB Green met in Sierra Leone is also well-done and affecting. Recommended, and the audio is wonderful.

[charon07 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you’ve seen John Green talk about his book or about his friend Henry Reider, you’ll know what to expect from Everything Is Tuberculosis. In his earnest, thoughtful, and compassionate way, he presents the history of tuberculosis, its sociocultural impacts, and the toll it takes on human lives, all grounded in the story of his friend Henry, whom he met in Sierra Leone at a hospital for patients with tuberculosis. It is also, in a way, about how we think about public health in terms of cost-benefit analysis rather than in terms of human suffering, about how problems become “out of sight, out of mind” until they resurge to bite us in the ass. This book is also a sad and timely testament to how cruel and short-sighted the current administration’s hacking away at U.S. aid for international health programs is.

[dele2451 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Never have I learned so much about a complex medical topic within the cover of a small single book. John Green has certainly put his popular writer's megaphone to very good use with the publication of this informative, important, heartbreaking and heartwarming story. A recommended read for any adult anywhere on the planet. We should be all be thankful John and Henry bumped into one another in that distant hospital hallway.