Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

By John Green (2025).

If you’ve heard of John Green, it is probably because of his young-adult novel The Fault in Our Stars and its successful movie adaptation. That success has allowed Green to pursue a number of worthwhile projects, one of which led him to a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone about five years ago. He soon became – obsessed is not too strong a word – with the problem of tuberculosis: why it persists as the world’s leading cause of death even though we have the medical knowledge to make it rare and perhaps eradicate it. Green’s history of the disease and our attempts to cure it is engaging and instructive; his story of Henry Rieder, a victim of tuberculosis who Green met in Sierra Leone, makes the problems personal and urgent. His analysis of how the global health care system has allowed tuberculosis to persist is sometimes frustratingly shallow, for example in failing to fully explore economic incentives in the pharmaceutical industry that lead to a high cost of treatment. But if nothing else, Green’s storytelling encourages us to adopt the sense of urgency he gained by befriending Henry, and that sense of urgency will be a key ingredient in solving the systemic problems Green identifies.

I read a hard copy of this book.