Book Review :: Everything is Tuberculous by John Green

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
ISBN: 1101592419
on 18 March 2025
Goodreads

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. 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 and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 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.

Last updated on 12 October 2025

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Something I don’t think I have to do is tell what Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green is about. Usually, I’d give you a bit of a brief overview of the story, the characters, the plot, perhaps the setting. But when you’re reading non-fiction, the description above says it better than I would anyway.

What I will tell you about, though, is some of my thoughts.

My first full memory of learning about tuberculosis was when I was about 15 when there was an outbreak of TB at a local high school (not mine), and several friends had to be tested for it. But I didn’t know a lot about it, even after hearing about it through the news, and seeing my friends chat about their classmates getting it.

But, as it turns out, that wasn’t my first encounter with TB. I don’t know when I actually knew about TB for the first time, but when I was about 2 or 3 years old and I had the BCG vaccination (which kids under 5 have), I was 1 in a million ‘have a bad reaction’ to it.

In Mongolia.

In the early 1990s.

With limited health care.

As a first child.

Who then had to be flown to Beijing for treatment.

Which didn’t actually help, and my ex-nurse of a mother had to step up.

I knew that I had had a bad reaction to a vaccine when I was young, hence the scar I have, which is about *puts tip of pointer finger to tip of thumb, moves pointer down to thumb fold line* this big, and it’s a long story that is a bit long-winded that I don’t need to get into … but I didn’t think I had clicked that it was to the TB vaccine.

Until the high school breakout, and the whole topic sort of resurfaced.

So when I clicked on that John Green had this obsession interest in TB and he was releasing a book, it immediately went onto my TBR. While I had been meaning to read the paperback version, I didn’t get around to it, so I eventually listened to John Green read it as an audiobook.

Hearing an author read their own book is always a really fun time, and actually not something that I’ve experienced that often. So if you’re an audiobook reader, definitely give the audio version a go!

Everything is Tuberculosis – Some Thoughts

Finally to some of my thoughts about Everything is Tuberculosis. I really enjoyed it.

As someone who isn’t a huge non-fiction reader, or who sometimes starts non-fiction and then never actually finishes it…I was a little surprised at how much I enjoyed listening to this one. Perhaps it was my vested interest in my very small encounter with TB as a child, or the fact that it was John Green and I love a lot of his books … who knows.

What I do know is that this was well written, informative, fascinating, and alarming, all at once.

“And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing.”

It’s told in first-person, as non-fiction usually is, as Green tells the story of when he went to Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, and met a young boy named Henry, who had tuberculosis. This was in 2019, and over the years, Green had various encounters with Henry and some of the other patients at the hospital.

The story of Henry is interwoven with chapters on the history of TB, the vaccination, the treatment, historical connections, what it looks like today … and how it has shaped a lot of what we know.

“But as a friend once told me, “’Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.’”

And it’s done so in a really accessible way. For someone who is not in the medical field at all, and who doesn’t know a lot about it other than the aforementioned stories … this was easy to digest, easy to listen to/read, and easy to talk about and share about afterwards.

You don’t need to be as obsessed with TB as Green is to enjoy this book. You don’t need to know a lot about the history or science behind it. You just need to be a little curious.

Give it a go, see what you think, and let me know in the comments if you’ve read this!