everything is tuberculosis

Rating: ★★★★★
Audience: Nonfiction
Length: 208 pages
Author: John Green
Publisher: Crash Course Books
Release Date: March 18th, 2025
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. 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 and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 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.

FASCINATING.

I loved listening to this. I binged the book in an evening because John Green writes in such an easy and understandable way when trying to process a lot of science based information. I thought the way the history was covered provided digestible pieces to understand the multi-faceted way the world has approached this long standing illness.

Combining this with the first hand accounts had me glued to my headphones. There were so many moments of learning and knowledge gained from this read. Highly recommend even if you’re not usually a nonfiction reader (like myself)!!

Overall audience notes: