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Everything is tuberculosis : the history and persistence of our deadliest infection
2025
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Author Notes
John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska , The Fault in Our Stars , Turtles All the Way Down , and The Anthropocene Reviewed . With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educa­tional channel Crash Course. John serves on the board of trustees for the global health non­profit Partners In Health and spoke at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on the Fight to End Tuberculosis.

John lives with his family in Indianapolis. You can visit him online at johngreenbooks.com or join the TB Fighters working to end tubercu­losis at tbfighters.org
Fiction/Biography Profile
Genre
NonFiction
Biography
Health, Mind and Body
Topics
Tuberculosis
Health
Poverty
Injustice
Friendship
Science
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Trade Reviews
Publishers Weekly Review
YA author Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed) takes another turn toward nonfiction in this congenial history of the world's "oldest contagious disease." Green writes that he became "obsessed" with tuberculosis after a chance meeting at a Sierra Leone hospital with a charming young patient, Henry Reider, who was sick with drug-resistant TB. Green weaves Henry's moving story of illness and recovery together with a social history of the disease, explaining that tuberculosis once killed rich and poor indiscriminately, but after the late-19th-century advent of germ theory, it became a "disease of the poor and marginalized." Green contends that, today, injustice--lack of access to adequate food, housing, and healthcare--is the "root cause" of all tuberculosis, and urges that since "we are the cause... we must also be the cure." Adhering to form, Green peppers his account with quirky-fun facts (the hatmaker who designed the Stetson, famously worn by cowboys, had moved to the West in search of a dry-air cure for his consumption) and YA-style philosophizing ("The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share"; "We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us"). He also offers personal reflections on how his journey into tuberculosis philanthropy was fueled by his OCD and how the disease reminded him of his YouTuber brother Hank Green's run-in with cancer. Green's fans will be pleased by this window into his latest obsession. (Mar.)
Summary
#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.
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