Over the years I have contemplated reading John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars. The novel published in 2012 continues to be a bestseller. However, the subject matter is grim, two dying teenagers who fall in love at a cancer support group, and so for now the book is not for me.

But I did want to read something by Green and when his latest book Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) came out I was interested. I am a big fan of the Bronte sisters not only their brilliant novels but the sisters themselves and their courage to continue writing even though the shadow of tuberculosis hovered over their entire family.

And when you read the classics you discover that tuberculosis killed so many great writers in the 19th and early twentieth century. I was also curious as to why John Green best known for young adult novels would decide to write a book about tuberculosis. He lays it out for us:

“It’s only because I met Henry Reider in 2019 that this book exists, and that I’ve found a hopefully good use for the curious megaphone I lucked into. TB has become the organizing principle of my professional life over the last five years. It’s nice to have something to think about before bed, and in the morning while brushing one’s teeth, and while walking in the woods—and what I think about is tuberculosis. I think about the strange fact that we could end the TB pandemic, but haven’t”

“In Everything Is Tuberculosis we learn about the history of TB. It’s been around for thousands of years ravaging every part of the world. How bad was it?

“Just in the last two centuries, tuberculosis caused over a billion human deaths … Covid-19 displaced tuberculosis as the world’s deadliest infectious disease from 2020 through 2022, but in 2023, TB regained the status it has held for most of what we know of human history. Killing 1,250,000 people, TB once again became our deadliest infection“.

Green also writes about the changing ways societies have viewed tuberculosis down through the centuries. Hippocrates advised his students not to bother treating TB (then called phthisis) because it was hopeless. Fast forward to the 18th and 19th century and a romanticism developed about TB, then called consumption. With so many young people dying, cut down in their prime, a theory developed that consumption affected those who were too fragile, too beautiful and poetic for this world.”

But towards the end of the 19th century due to better quality of living (nutrition, sanitation, housing) TB rates in Europe and the US began to drop causing the way society viewed tuberculosis to change. It was now seen as an infectious disease of poor people crowded into tenements and work spaces where it could spread rapidly due to coughing and sneezing. And in 1943 Rutgers graduate students Albert Schatz and Elizabeth Bugie developed Streptomycin, the first antibiotic for TB and further treatments would follow. By the 1950’s tuberculosis was no longer a worry if you lived in wealthy countries with access to healthcare. But as Green writes

“This is a book about that cure—why we didn’t find it until the 1950s, and why in the decades since discovering the cure, we’ve allowed over 150,000,000 humans to die of tuberculosis … the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not“

And above all this is a book about Henry Reider a young teenager that Green met in Sierra Leone confined to a hospital. Henry had a resistant form of TB and no way to treat it because access to the life saving medication is too expensive in Sierra Leone. Despite this Henry is optimistic and his mother and doctor never gave up and we follow Henry’s inspiring journey throughout the book

Everything Is Tuberculosis is one of those books where you find yourself underlining on every other page. I learned so much and a big recommendation from me.