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

By John Green

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

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

AN ACCLAIMED BEST BOOK OF 2025: NPR, Scientific American, Science News, Booklist, BookPage, Chicago Sun-Times. Goodreads Readers’ Choice Nonfiction Winner.

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 Young Readers Group
• Release date: Mar 18, 2025
• ISBN: 9781101592410

John Green

John Green es el autor best seller de novelas como Bajo la misma estrella, Buscando a Alaska y Mil veces hasta siempre. Sus libros han recibido numerosos reconocimientos, entre los cuales destacan la medalla Printz, el Premio de Honor Printz y el Premio Edgard. Green ha sido finalista en dos ocasiones del Book Prize del LA Times y fue seleccionado por la revista Time como una de las 100 personas más influyentes del mundo. Es también guionista y presentador del podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, que ha recibido excelentes críticas. Junto con su hermano, Hank, John Green ha creado muchos proyectos online de vídeo, incluyendo Vlogbrothers y el canal educativo Crash Course. Vive con su familia en Indianápolis, Indiana.

Book preview

Introduction

Gregory and Stokes

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Scottish tinkerer and chemist James Watt began working on a new project.

He had already achieved fame and success for making steam engines more efficient, helping to fuel the industrial revolution that would radically reshape human history. The steam engine would lead to everything from air-conditioning to air travel to AirPods, while also unleashing over a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, reshaping the planet’s climate. Watt’s innovation carried within it so much power that we named a measurement of power after him. Watt also made other important contributions to the human collection of tools and knowledge, inventing a machine that could copy sculptures and developing new strategies for manufacturing chlorine to bleach textiles.

But Watt hoped this new project would be his most important yet. He became obsessed with finding some kind of chemical solution to treat the lung disease known to physicians as phthisis.

Watt’s daughter Jessy had died of phthisis at the age of fifteen in 1794. And now his son, Gregory, was ill with the disease, suffering from the classic symptoms of a persistent cough, night sweats, fever, and the physical wasting of the body that gave the disease its colloquial name: consumption. Gregory was in his early twenties, a skilled orator known for being phenomenally attractive—one friend described him as literally the most beautiful youth I ever saw.

In a furious attempt to save Gregory, Watt helped invent a device that delivered nitrous oxide to the lungs, believing that shifting the amount of oxygen available to the body might help it heal. But the treatment proved unsuccessful. After many years of suffering, Gregory died of consumption in 1804 at the age of twenty-seven.

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—

By 1900, phthisis had come to be known by a new name: tuberculosis. My great-uncle Stokes Goodrich was born that year in rural Tennessee. He was raised in a wood-frame house built by my great-grandfather Charles, a country doctor who rode his horse night and day around Franklin County delivering babies and dispensing medicine.

Stokes was a sickly child. In those days—and in these ones, too, I suppose—it was common to connect illness to some kind of deficiency, failure, or past mistake. A physician might conclude, as one German doctor did in the early eighteenth century, that a woman’s life-threatening illness was brought on by a dog which barked loudly at her. For baby Stokes, being given coffee and sweets by a family friend was thought to be the inciting incident. Thereafter, Stokes developed the worst case of typhoid fever I ever saw recover, my great-grandfather later reported in a short memoir he wrote for our family.

In 1918, when Stokes was eighteen, he again nearly died during the Great Influenza pandemic when he became ill while working at a munitions factory. He survived, and in 1920 went to work for Alabama Power and Light, laboring as a lineman. As the 1920s progressed, Stokes experienced frequent bouts of what he hoped might be bronchitis. But the stubborn cough would not go away, and eventually, after coughing up blood, he sought medical attention.

Here is how my great-grandfather reported what happened next: Stokes went to see a fine doctor in Gadsden, Alabama, who X-rayed him and discovered tuberculosis in the apex of his right lung. The X-ray technician who made the film told me, ‘Dr. Goodrich, your son has miliary tuberculosis, and I have never seen a case that lived over two months.’

Stokes was placed in a sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina, one of many American cities that functioned as a tuberculosis colony of sorts. Stokes had the best of care in the sanatorium but steadily grew worse, and on May 18, 1930, passed over the river to his Lord.

My great-uncle was twenty-nine years old. I often wonder what it must have been like for my great-grandfather, having trained as a doctor, to be unable to save his own son from disease.

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.

---

—

Now we are two centuries removed from the deaths of Jessy and Gregory Watts, and nearly a century removed from the death of my great-uncle Stokes. Still, over a million people died of tuberculosis in 2023. That year, in fact, more people died of TB than died of malaria, typhoid, and war combined.

Just in the last two centuries, tuberculosis caused over a billion human deaths. One estimate, from Frank Ryan’s Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, maintains that TB has killed around one in seven people who’ve ever lived. Covid-19 displaced tuberculosis as the world’s deadliest infectious disease from 2020 through 2022, but in 2023, TB regained the status it has held for most of what we know of human history. Killing 1,250,000 people, TB once again became our deadliest infection. What’s different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.

In 2000, the Ugandan physician Dr. Peter Mugyenyi gave a speech about the rich world’s refusal to expand access to drugs treating HIV/AIDS. Millions of people were dying each year of AIDS, even though safe and effective antiretroviral therapy could have saved most of their lives. Where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not, Dr. Mugyenyi said. And where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not.

And so it is with TB. This year, thousands of doctors will attend to millions of TB patients, and just as my great-grandfather could not save his son, these physicians will be unable to save their patients, because the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.

---

—

This is a book about that cure—why we didn’t find it until the 1950s, and why in the decades since discovering the cure, we’ve allowed over 150,000,000 humans to die of tuberculosis. I started writing about TB because I wanted to understand how an illness could quietly shape so much of human history. But along the way, I learned that TB is both a form and expression of injustice. And I learned that how we imagine illness shapes our societies and our priorities. James Watt understood consumption as a mechanical failure by the lungs to ingest the proper ratio of gases. My great-grandfather understood his son’s sickliness to have been driven by ingesting coffee and sweets in childhood. Others would understand TB as an inherited disease that affected certain types of personalities. Still others would argue that the illness was caused by demon possession, or poisoned air, or God’s judgment, or whiskey. And each of these ways of understanding tuberculosis shaped not just how people lived and died of TB, but also who lived and died of it.

Today, we understand tuberculosis as an infection caused by bacteria. TB is airborne—it spreads from person to person through small particles contained in coughs, sneezes, or exhalations. Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, between one-quarter and one-third of all living humans have been infected with it. In most people, the infection will lie dormant for a lifetime. But up to 10 percent of the infected will eventually become sick, a phenomenon we call active TB. People are especially likely to develop active TB if they have a weakened immune system due to other health problems like diabetes, HIV infection, or malnutrition. In fact, of the ten million people who became sick with TB in 2023, over five million also experienced malnutrition. And because the disease spreads especially well in crowded living and working conditions like slums and poorly ventilated factories, tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty, an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.

The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans.

My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.

Chapter 1

Lakka

When I first visited Lakka Government Hospital a few years back, I did not really want to be there.

Sarah and I were in Sierra Leone, a nation of nearly nine million people in West Africa, to learn about the country’s maternal and neonatal healthcare systems. At the time, Sierra Leone had the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, with around one in every seventeen women dying in pregnancy or childbirth, and we’d traveled there to learn about and share stories of people affected by the crisis.[*]

So our trip was supposed to be oriented around the global maternal mortality crisis, not tuberculosis, and by our last day in Sierra Leone, I was exhausted and ill. (I possess a somewhat fragile constitution when it comes to health, and also when it comes to most other things.) But a doctor we were traveling with asked us to visit Lakka with him. He assured us that Lakka, a facility supported by the global health nonprofit Partners In Health, was basically on the way to the airport, and he needed to consult with the staff about a few cases.

---

—

At the time, I knew almost nothing about TB. To me, it was a disease of history—something that killed depressive nineteenth-century poets, not present-tense humans. But as a friend once told me, Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.

When we arrived at Lakka, we were immediately greeted by a child who introduced himself as Henry. That’s my son’s name, I told him, and he smiled. Most Sierra Leoneans are multilingual, but Henry spoke particularly good English, especially for a kid his age, which made it possible for us to have a conversation that could go beyond my few halting phrases of Krio. I asked him how he was doing, and he said, I am happy, sir. I am encouraged. He loved that word. Who wouldn’t? Encouraged, like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into.

My son Henry was nine then, and this Henry looked about the same age—a small boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. He wore shorts and an oversized rugby shirt that reached nearly to his knees. Henry took hold of my T-shirt and began walking me around the hospital. He showed me the lab where a technician was looking through a microscope. Henry looked into the microscope and then asked me to, as the lab tech, a young woman from Freetown, explained that this sample contained tuberculosis even though the patient had been treated for several months with standard therapy. The lab tech began to tell me about this standard therapy, but Henry was pulling on my shirt again. He walked me through the wards, a complex of poorly ventilated buildings that contained hospital rooms with barred windows, thin mattresses, and no toilets. There was no electricity in the wards, and no consistent running water. To me, the rooms resembled prison cells. Before it was a TB hospital, Lakka was a leprosy isolation facility—and it felt like one.

Inside each room, one or two patients lay on cots, generally on their side or back. A few sat on the edges of their beds, leaning forward. All these men (the women were in a separate ward) were thin. Some were so emaciated that their skin seemed wrapped tightly around bone. As we walked down a hallway between buildings, Henry and I watched a young man drink water from a plastic bottle, and then promptly vomit a mix of bile and blood. I instinctively turned away, but Henry continued to stare at the man.

I figured Henry was someone’s kid—a doctor, maybe, or a nurse, or one of the cooking or cleaning staff. Everyone seemed to know him, and everyone stopped their work to say hello and rub his head or squeeze his hand. I was immediately charmed by Henry—he had some of the mannerisms of my son, the same paradoxical mixture of shyness and enthusiastic desire for connection.

Henry eventually brought me back to the group of doctors and nurses who were meeting in a small room near the entrance of the hospital, and then one of the nurses lovingly and laughingly shooed him away.

Who is that kid? I asked.

Henry? answered a nurse. The sweetest boy.

He’s one of the patients we’re worried about, said a physician who went by Dr. Micheal.

He’s a patient? I asked.

Yes.

He’s such a cute little kid, I said. I hope he’s going to be okay.

Dr. Micheal told me that Henry wasn’t a little boy. He was seventeen. He was only so small because he’d grown up malnourished, and then the TB had further emaciated his body.

He seems to be doing okay, I said. Lots of energy. He walked me all around the hospital.

This is because the antibiotics are working, Dr. Micheal explained. But we know they are not working well enough. We are almost certain they will fail, and that is a big problem. He shrugged, tight-lipped.

There was a lot I didn’t understand.

---

—

I saw Henry again as we were getting ready to leave. He was standing near the entrance to the hospital, and I asked him if I could take his picture. He said yes, and I photographed him a few times.

Photograph of Henry, he is smiling and stood leaning against a wall with his arms folded.

We scrolled through the pictures together. I tried to communicate that I was smiling from behind my mask. Henry wore no mask—his bacterial load was low enough that he posed no infection risk to others. As we chatted, I realized I was looking at him differently than I had when I believed him to be the son of a staff member. He no longer reminded me of my nine-year-old son; now he was an emaciated young man. When he looked up at me, I saw yellow clouds in the whites of his eyes—a byproduct of the liver toxicity that frequently accompanies the treatment he was on. I noticed swelling on one side of his neck—which I would later learn is a telltale sign that TB has infected the lymph nodes. I asked him if he took medicine every day.

Yes, he said. I swallow them. Also they inject shot.

"Is that

Reviews for Everything Is Tuberculosis

[mktoronto · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a beautiful mix of the history and treatment of tuberculosis and the tale of a man who spent his childhood in Sierra Leone battling it. Green does a great job of outlining how tuberculosis has shaped social mores and medical othering for centuries. He then makes a passionate case for TB being a disease of injustice just as much as bacteria. His compassion and authenticity comes through on every page. The book ends with an element of hope, showing us that with societal commitment we can stop the million plus deaths from this plague.

(Unfortunately, the asshats decimating the US government have stopped funding all the promising work that is mentioned at the end. Green talked about this during his press tour and you can find the interviews on YouTube. Funding needs to be stepped up, not cut, and not just from the US. Canada can play a role in this too.)

I follow Green on his Vlogbrothers channel so I've watched him create the book as he shared his steps along the way. To say I was excited for it is an understatement and it lived up to my expectations. I'm especially grateful that in an era of 300 - 400 page books becoming standard, this one comes in at a sweet 200 pages. This includes a recommended reading section at the end to delve deeper to whatever aspect you want. I don't know if a perfect book exists but this comes pretty damn close.

[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.

[helena11-369096 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mere despair never tells the whole human story, as much as despair would like to insist otherwise. Hopelessness has the insidious talent of explaining everything: the reason X or Y sucks is that everything sucks, the reason you're miserable is because misery is the correct response to the world as we find it, and so on. I am prone to despair, and so I know its powerful voice; it just doesn't happen to be true. Here's the truth as I see it: Vicious cycles are common. Injustice and unfairness permeate every aspect of human life. But virtuous cycles are also possible.

Listening to John Green talk about this book a few months ago in person was so crazy and childhood-affirming. Reading this felt like a really gentle punch to the gut followed by Green's comforting Liberal Optimism. This was super short and could it have gone more in depth? Sure. I hope everyone who reads this gets as incensed with the for-profit pharmaceutical industry as I am and starts to examine the ways in which health and inequality are inextricably linked. I don't know if that will be the case. Regardless, however, this was a 5 star read for me and a Tuberculosis 101 course, priming me for further reading (which he provides at the end of the book!!).

[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.

[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

[foggidawn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Before visiting Lakka hospital in Sierra Leone, author John Green kind of assumed that tuberculosis wasn't really at thing anymore. Wasn't it one of those illnesses of the past that we'd already found a cure for? Well, no and yes: though drugs to treat and cure TB were developed over 75 years ago, it still ravages poor and mid-range countries, especially where the infrastructure to distribute the medicines doesn't exist. At Lakka, Green met Henry, a patient that Green at first assumed to be around the same age as his 9-year-old son (also named Henry). Green soon learned that Henry at Lakka was actually 17: malnutrition and disease had stunted his growth, though not his spirit or creativity. As Green got to know Henry and his mother Isatu, his interest in TB increased. Over the course of his research into the disease, he learned many fascinating stories about how the history of TB is entwined with the history of humanity. As for the future, who can say? Humanity has the means to eradicate the disease, though it would be a generations-long process costing billions of dollars. The alternative, however, is that the disease continues to spread, especially in drug-resistant forms. Could it someday be as deadly as it was before a cure was developed?

Green's writing, as always, goes down easy. His conversational authorial voice makes for a pleasant reading experience. As a listener to the podcast he does with his brother Hank, I had heard many of his anecdotes about the history of TB, though the book ties these together with the story of Henry as his illness progresses. It's not a long book, but one hopes that it will be an important one, raising awareness of the issue of getting TB treatments to places around the world where they are desperately needed.

[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.

[scottjpearson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Historians sometimes contend that before the fall of the Roman Empire, Western society possessed enough knowledge that our civilization could have advanced directly to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. Instead, the advent of the so-called Dark Ages reminds us that history does not always progress. We must seize the opportunities; our collective will and choices matter in history’s long arc. Novelist John Green has a self-described “obsession” with the disease of tuberculosis, or what was formerly known as consumption. In this book, he transforms this deep interest into a well-worded plea advocating for additional attention and money to crush this infectious disease.

Tuberculosis (or TB) used to affect everyone in society – both rich and poor. Those in crowded urban settings tended to suffer more, but everyone was affected. Today, rich countries are relatively free of tuberculosis while the disease continues to plague poor countries. We know about good treatments; even multi-drug resistant TB is relatively treatable. The main problem is economic. Most countries inundated by TB have weak healthcare systems because of financial limitations. Those limitations took place because of colonization systems that served the rich in other countries and depleted the country’s resources. To be blunt, the rich exploited the poor and now won’t share their cures with them.

Green makes an eloquent case that today’s TB situation stems from injustice. He advances his point by describing a few individual stories and how, with a few changes and society’s collective will, we might live in a different world. He avoids sentimentality and instead focuses on critical thinking. He also makes the case that rich countries’ collective neglect of global health might end up making them – us – relapse into illness.

In an era where the world’s richest nation will not fund even continued efforts to mitigate HIV, Green’s pleas can seem like a pipe dream. However, steady organization and awareness can expand our horizons. While many use society’s abundance and excess wealth to fund frivolous adventures, perhaps we should instead consider serving our fellow humans with global health. This book is aimed to the general population and especially pertinent to those in public health. Reading it can be a start in that trajectory to a more just world, a world with less TB and more social flourishing.

[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.

[formerenglishteacher · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

John Green is known primarily for his wonderful YA (young adult) books, all best sellers, but this joins his nonfiction list including the Anthropocene Reviewed, a book of essays born from Green and his brother’s podcast that “reviews various aspects of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale” (Google AI). This book is Green’s gift to the world of understanding one of our most misunderstood diseases, Tuberculosis. Before you dismiss the book because you don’t think you care about a disease that has faded from memory in this country, consider it if you felt threatened by our recent experience with Covid 19. Green tells the story of TB through the journey of a young Sierra Leonean named Henry, a named he shares with Green’s own son. Through Henry’s story, Green educates his readers with the knowledge that TB is not an incurable disease. It is a disease of social and economic class where “rich” countries like our own are able to spend little time concerning ourselves with the ravages of it. In the meantime, TB continues to spread and kill in poorer countries, especially in Africa where Henry lives. I would like to hear John Green’s take on the current state of U.S. aid to the less fortunate world. Because of recent events, the result of the last presidential election, this book is more important than ever. Hopefully, it won’t be banned in schools and public libraries, although I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it is.

[villemezbrown · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The subtitle says "history," but don't let that scare you off as this is actually a vibrant and timely call for activism that rails against the health inequity, systemic racism, and market-driven cost-effectiveness calculations that condemn more than a million people to die each year of a curable disease.

And that's a death toll that's only going to get bigger thanks to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE slashing USAID's already-inadequate funding to control the disease.

Read this. Get educated. Get mad. Get motivated. Get active.


FOR REFERENCE:

Contents: Introduction. Gregory and Stokes -- Chapter 1. Lakka -- Chapter 2. Cowboys and Assassins -- Chapter 3. Look at Our Railroads -- Chapter 4. That Wealth Never Warded Off -- Chapter 5. Whipped Away -- Chapter 6. Tiger Got to Hunt -- Chapter 7. The Flattering Malady -- Chapter 8. The Bacillus -- Chapter 9. Not a Person -- Chapter 10. A Study in Tuberculin -- Chapter 11. Trepidation and Hope -- Chapter 12. The Cure -- Chapter 13. Where the Cure Is Not -- Chapter 14. Marco. Polo. -- Chapter 15. Dr. Girum -- Chapter 16. Henry -- Chapter 17. “Beat Me Later” -- Chapter 18. Superbug -- Chapter 19. Vicious Cycles -- Chapter 20. Hail Mary -- Chapter 21. Like Magic -- Chapter 22. Virtuous Cycles -- Chapter 23. The Cause and the Cure -- Postscript -- Acknowledgments -- Further Reading


SIDE NOTES:

• Be sure to read Green's mini-essay about the font of the book hidden in tiny print at the bottom of the copyright page.

• Why is the cover an ugly version of the cover for Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke?

[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.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm so glad I read this book. Hopefully, many more people will read it and decide it is time to do something about this disease.

John Green went to Sierra Leone in 2019. While there he visited Lakka Hospital where he met a young man named Henry. They struck up a conversation since Green has a son named Henry. He thought this Henry was about the same age as his son, nine years old at the time, but, in fact, this Henry was 17. He was so small and thin due to the tuberculosis that had resisted treatment for years and also because of the poverty that his family endured. After meeting Henry Green started reading everything he could about TB. And he couldn't forget Henry. That's what led to writing this book. Far from being a disease of the past, TB continues to rage in poorer countries and kill 1,300,000 people each year. Yet TB can be treated successfully now that we have antibiotics; we just don't get those treatments to the places where they are needed. Green makes the case that it is far cheaper in the long run to address the needs of everyone with TB than letting it continue to infect more and more people. There is already a problem with drug resistance to many of the current antibiotics. It is possible that sometime the TB bacilli will become superbug resistant and spread around the world. Of course, Green also makes the case that treating the disease without treating the underlying poverty where it thrives is doing too little.

With the current person in the White House cutting back research funding and refusing to donate to world development, I feel like it could be a long time before TB is eradicated.

[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.

[oldandnewbooksmell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

John Green talks about tuberculosis’ history and how it’s connected to many things.

This book goes beyond statistics by putting a name to a patient, Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, and humanizing the experience of living with TB.

Green isn’t wrong that everything is tuberculosis - is some of it stretched a little bit to make the connection? Sometimes, but for how long this disease has been around, it’s bound to be connected to everything in some way, shape, or another.

I do applaud Green for calling out big pharmaceutical companies (cough cough Johnson&Johnson) for having such high prices for medicine for no other reason than greed - because if you heal a patient, that’s one less person using your medicine.

“What’s different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.”

But also the fact that TB becomes drug resistant because it’s constantly evolving into different strains is INSANE.

Overall, I knew I would enjoy this book - I like anything John Green writes to be honest. This is definitely a crash course in tuberculosis, but it’s an amazing starting point for people.