Everything Is Tuberculosis
The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
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4.5 • 261 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A curable disease kills over one million people every year, and John Green wants you to know why. While visiting a hospital in Sierra Leone, the Fault in Our Stars author met a boy named Henry, whose battle with tuberculosis became a catalyst for the writer’s deep dive into the disease’s history and ongoing devastation. What Green discovered was staggering: Despite being preventable and treatable, TB continues to thrive, not because of medical limitations but due to systemic inequality, corporate greed, and political neglect. Blending history, science, and personal narrative, Green’s vivid storytelling brings urgent attention to a disease long dismissed as a relic of the past. His ability to connect the human element with the systemic makes Everything Is Tuberculosis as compelling as it is unsettling. Alarming, deeply personal, and impossible to ignore, this read will open your eyes to a global health crisis that should have ended long ago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
YA author Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed) takes another turn toward nonfiction in this congenial history of the world's "oldest contagious disease." Green writes that he became "obsessed" with tuberculosis after a chance meeting at a Sierra Leone hospital with a charming young patient, Henry Reider, who was sick with drug-resistant TB. Green weaves Henry's moving story of illness and recovery together with a social history of the disease, explaining that tuberculosis once killed rich and poor indiscriminately, but after the late-19th-century advent of germ theory, it became a "disease of the poor and marginalized." Green contends that, today, injustice—lack of access to adequate food, housing, and healthcare—is the "root cause" of all tuberculosis, and urges that since "we are the cause... we must also be the cure." Adhering to form, Green peppers his account with quirky-fun facts (the hatmaker who designed the Stetson, famously worn by cowboys, had moved to the West in search of a dry-air cure for his consumption) and YA-style philosophizing ("The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share"; "We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us"). He also offers personal reflections on how his journey into tuberculosis philanthropy was fueled by his OCD and how the disease reminded him of his YouTuber brother Hank Green's run-in with cancer. Green's fans will be pleased by this window into his latest obsession.
Customer Reviews
John Green is a bit OCD…
And that came to be useful in his grasp of this enormous topic. The tale itself is somewhat journalistic, as may be expected from a writer, but deeper than usual- toward the writing of John McPhee. Please note the list of further reading. This is excellent.
Everything is tuberculosis
As an infection preventionist, the medical history is interesting to me, but as a nurse the human story is more important . I had the privilege of hearing Dr Farmer at Harvard and working with some PIH and MSF staffers in different non-frontline settings and appreciate even more now all that they offer the world. I fear for our political climate now in 2025 and know full well the loss of the US health initiatives will set us all back. But I can only hope for a “virtuous “cycle to return in my lifetime.
Im the first reviewer
This is very important information.