Crash Course Books, 2025. 198 pages. Nonfiction
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, 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.
Green does a fantastic job weaving the historical atrocities of tuberculosis with the current ones. I, like probably most of those living in an overall wealthy country, have hardly given tuberculosis more than a cursory thought in my whole life. Even if I managed to contract it, I have never worried about the course of treatment being unavailable to me. The book is an inspiring call to action, well-researched, and should be required reading for all those that care about global health.
If you like Everything is Tuberculosis you might also like:
Mountains Beyond Mountains
by Tracy Kidder
Random House, 2003. 332 pages. Biography
A portrait of infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Farmer follows the efforts of this unconventional Harvard genius to understand the world's great health, economic, and social problems and to bring healing to humankind.
Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Plagues
by Jonathan Kennedy
Crown, 2023. 294 pages. Nonfiction
Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, this revelatory book takes us through 60,000 years of history to show how the major transformations in history have been shaped by eight major outbreaks of infectious disease.
RBL
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