Author: John Green
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult nonfiction
Pages: 208 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA and Sierra Leone
Summary: 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.
Review: I am a fan of John Green's novels (links to my reviews: Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars) and have heard really good things about this nonfiction book so in I jumped (even though I couldn't convince either book group to read it!).
I liked that this book was a mix of historical information about TB itself, the medical work done to figure out how it spread and the cure, and the stigmas around TB. But the most impactful parts were when Green talks about how racism affects health care and medical advancements.
In the 1700s and 1800s the medical establishment in the US and Europe believed Black people weren't sensitive and creative enough to get TB and in the late 1800s, once white people were moving into the new middle and upper classes in larger numbers (and therefore not getting TB nearly as often), they said that Black people are more susceptible to TB. Um, no. TB comes from poverty, malnutrition, and crowded living conditions. If you put Black people in those situations, they will be the ones to get sick. Easy for me to say in 2025, I supposed. And this shouldn't be new information that non-white people have a tougher time when it comes to accessing health care for any reason.
Threading Henry's story in amongst the factual portions of TB makes the book more readable. It is human nature to relate to the story of one over the vague and Henry is that story of one in this book.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Diversity--Much is set in Africa, and, actually, it covers the world
- Literary Escapes--Sierra Leone
- Nonfiction--Published in 2025
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