Author: John Green

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

Date: 2025

Pages: 198

Genre: Adult Nonfiction

According to the World Health Organization, over 10 million people worldwide contracted tuberculosis (TB) in 2023. That same year, TB accounted for 1.25 million fatalities. If you think these figures are stunning, consider that tuberculosis is a treatable condition. That’s right: over a million people died just two years ago of a disease that has a known cure. This stunning oxymoron is at the heart of John Green’s latest masterwork, Everything Is Tuberculosis.

Using his trademark open heart and lack of cynicism, the author uses his platform as a public figure to shine light on the history, present, and possible future of this still-very-real threat to our species. This book is based on extensive research cultivated through years of personal visits with TB patients, survivors, and healthcare workers worldwide. Just try not to fall in love with Henry, who contracted TB as a boy in Sierra Leone and faced year after year of medical setbacks with boundless optimism and lust for life.

A major theme of this book is that TB has biological origins, but is not politically or socially neutral. In fact, tuberculosis exploits and exacerbates social inequalities such as malnutrition, crowded living conditions, and lack of access to consistent treatments. In the 19th century, before germ theory had taken hold in the medical community, it was en vogue in Europe and the U.S. to associate tuberculosis with poetic impulses and ethereal beauty. Later, as TB was medicalized and controlled with antibiotics, it sort of fell off of the Western world’s metaphorical radar.

Today, the millions of people who suffer from TB—mostly in developing countries—are easily overlooked (largely echoing the trajectory of HIV/AIDS in the 1990s). It’s tempting to ease our own anxiety by assuming the victims must have done something to deserve or cause their illness. Susan Sontag said that “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning.” Green writes at length about the way that stigma is intertwined with tuberculosis, making it difficult to get treatment to those who need it most.

There is much reason to be concerned when it comes to TB—but there’s reason for hope, too. Treatments exist, but they need to be modernized and marketed and distributed. We need education, transportation infrastructure, and stronger pharmaceutical ethics. Give this issue your awareness, your time—heck, even your money if you’re able. The one thing that’s guaranteed not to help is despair. As Green puts it, “Mere despair never tells the whole human story, as much as despair would like to insist otherwise.”

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Faithe Miller Lakowicz

Concord Public Library