Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
#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.
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.
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Readers say *Everything Is Tuberculosis* offers a compassionate, insightful blend of history, science, and personal stories revealing tuberculosis as ...
This book is an astounding eye opener. The world is deliberately ignorant of the facts surrounding this deadly disease. I should say, the “rich” world. The solutions put forth by the author are sensible, doable, but as with must inequality, they have little to do with the medical cause of the infection, and more to do with the injustice surrounding accessibility to the cure. We need virtuous cycles, not vicious cycles. This book is a must read.
a nice entry level narrative into tuberculosis and more generally, social determinants of health. would recommend to non-ph friends for sure.
A well-written book about the world's deadliest infectious disease, tuberculosis. John Green informs us about the history, current science, inequality of treatment, and social prejudice. It reminded me of "Mountains Beyond Mountains", a book about Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners In Health (PIH), which significantly impacted me in college.
I have been interested in TB since a positive skin test as a teen in the early 1980s. A year’s course of Isoniazid and multiple chest x-rays became my personal connection to the disease. Because of that experience, I also did a research paper on the disease. Even still, I learned so much more in reading John Green’s book. Exploring the history of tb through the lenses of biomedical and social structures as well as the very real human experience as he relates Henry’s story, we learn about a disease that still threatens the world. It’s fascinating how poverty, racism, and stigma controls who is deemed worthy of a cure. Mr. Green putting his platform behind changing this dynamic is added benefit of his hyper fixation on learning about tb. Perhaps he will inspire more people to get involved.
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