Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
Crash Course Books
John Green may have initially won my heart with his (now classic) young adult novel "The Fault in Our Stars" (2012), but it was his knockout collection of essays, “The Anthropocene Reviewed” (2021) that convinced me to follow his curiosity wherever it led – which is how his latest, “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection,” landed on my nightstand.
Because if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t normally include a book about consumption in my summer reading plans. But here we are.
Part of Green’s appeal, of course, is his aforementioned curiosity, along with his mad storytelling skills, his palpable humanism, and his ability to translate deep-dive research findings into accessible, often-witty prose. These are all on display again with “Everything,” of course. But unlike in “Anthropocene,” which invited you to follow the Indiana-based author down numerous quirky rabbit holes, Green stays laser-focused this time on a single topic.
That makes “Everything” both more ambitious (even at a mere 200 pages) and less propulsive, especially in the context of our short-attention-span era. The charm of Green’s nonfiction involves the sense of renting space within the author’s bright, voraciously inquisitive mind for a short time. While your interest in Green’s obsessions may occasionally flag along the way, his own passion never does – and that commitment ultimately wins the day.
What starts Green on this intellectual journey? A chance meeting with a boy named Henry in a Sierra Leone hospital. The charismatic kid appeared to be the same age as Green’s 9-year-old son (also named Henry). The author soon learns the boy is 17, “small because he’d grown up malnourished, and then the TB had further emaciated his body.”
A doctor at the hospital tells Green that Henry is unlikely to survive his disease, despite receiving medical care.
The encounter launches Green (upon his return to the States) into TB research. The immersion causes the writer to start seeing links to the disease everywhere (hence the book’s title).
“I found that I simply could not shut up about the disease. Someone would mention New Mexico, and I’d jump in: ‘Did you know that New Mexico became a state partly because of tuberculosis?’ Or, if a conversation turned to World War I, I’d respond, ‘Did you know that tuberculosis sorta kinda but not really caused World War I?’ Or perhaps at a neighborhood Halloween party, I’d confront a ten-year-old dressed as a cowboy: ‘Did you know tuberculosis helped give us the cowboy hat?’”
Green uses these strange and surprising bits of TB trivia as a lighter point of entry for the reader (who starts to feel their own curiosity being piqued). He then skillfully starts tying together pieces of myriad darker historic forces – including colonialism, racism, warfare, capitalism, fashion, now-defunct medical beliefs, etc. – to provide context for why and how Henry has such a bleak prognosis, despite TB's status as a curable disease.
Near the book’s end, Green writes, “I would submit that TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by … social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us.”
This may sound scold-y, but huge-hearted Green is, in the end, a disappointed optimist who follows up this damning verdict with a shot of hope: “A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing. But we can choose a different world.”
Green understands that if he can make readers fall in love and grow invested in Henry, too, we’ll follow his complicated TB journey, consider the disease at both the micro and macro level, explore some hard questions and truths, and then want to do something to help create positive change.
Does Henry somehow manage to survive TB?
This is the question that drives the last chapters of the book, so I won’t say. But I will tell you that for a while, I could barely restrain myself from looking several chapters ahead to find out – which indicates that Green’s mission of making me care was more than accomplished.
