Book Review: Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green

In the realm of tuberculosis (TB) non-fiction, there are not many reading choices. Good Reads lists a total of 36 books under the topic of “tuberculosis”, most of which are in the genre I like to call “reality as fiction”, such as Breathing Room by Marsha Hayles, which tells the story of children stuck in TB wards in the age before treatment.

So when I heard John Green was about to publish a book with the main topic TB, I was very excited, so much so that I convinced my partner to gift me a signed copy (and I am pretty sure mine was between 40 and 50 000 because John provided a handy dandy colour guide to his signed books - link).

I mostly know of John Green because I’ve been following him and his brother, Hank, online, more or less since they started posting videos way back in 2007 (yes, I am that old). He is also an excellent author, with his book “The Fault in Our Stars” becoming an indie darling in 2014.

Green starts from the transformative experience of meeting a boy with TB named Henry in Sierra Leone. From this transformative meeting, he weaves through the history of TB, the struggles to define it, the progress in understanding it, the art which it inspired, the shifting perceptions surrounding it, and, finally, the challenges to curing the deadliest curable disease. And every so often, we come back to Henry, and we are pulled in the tragedy of a TB patient who is all TB patients and we hope against hope that Henry survives (I won’t spoil it).

It is a magical book, who does justice to all of us who are working in this field and to all of the people who are or have been affected by this disease.

And hey, even if you are an expert, you might learn something new, as I did.

I highly recommend this read.

Ioana Margineanu, co-chair of the Union TB and Migration Group