Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
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.
For the Reading Challenge(s):
2026 Nonfiction Reader Challenge
2026 52 Book Club Reading Challenge (Prompt #36: Award-winning book from last year)
The Reason
This has been on my TBR for a while and I’ve heard a lot of praise for it as well. It was also voted in for my online bookclub’s January BOTM so I finally took the plunge!
The Quotes
“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
“It reminded me, that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.”
“The idea of becoming sick in order to look healthy or beautiful speaks to how profoundly consumptive beauty ideals still shape the world we share.”
The Narrator(s)
John Green. It was a wonderful narration; clear and expressive.
My Thoughts
It’s the Book of the Month for my online bookclub and we had some interesting discussions about the book. Some of which revolved around the whole idea that Green writes in his introduction; “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not”.
We lament our ignorance on the topic but we acknowledge our privilege in that we’re ignorant because we don’t need to know about it, because it doesn’t affect us as much, and when it does, we have the cure. We discuss the racism, classism, sexism, and other -isms, that lead to some of us having easy access to the cure and others dying from it. It’s a disgrace to see corporations like J&J profiting off the suffering of others and often directly causing death by witholding cures and treatments.
It is also difficult to read it and realize that this isn’t history; this is still happening right now. We are not living in better times, far from it. This book has given me so much to think about. I’m glad I read it.
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
Thanks for sharing your perspective
Yeah. Almost everyone with TB could be cured right now if only the right people could be made to care and put profit aside. (There are cases which would be a lot trickier, which Green doesn’t discuss in great detail: extensively drug resistant TB is something I wrote my BSc dissertation about, so I know a bit more about it. I got a bit more optimistic after studying during my MSc, because there are usually still some drugs that will affect it, and sometimes even surgical procedures are of worth — provided that people get adequate support through the gruelling treatment processes.)
I’m really hoping that the greater awareness I’ve seen this book bring will help make changes somehow. I should really dig in and find a non-UK TB charity and support that too (I already support TB Alert, which does work with vulnerable populations in the UK — a topic Green didn’t go into much IIRC, but basically homeless people are at massive risk — though it also works in India).