Everything Is Tuberculosis
“Everything Is Tuberculosis isn’t about an ancient disease. It’s about what it means to be human, how we understand suffering, how we respond to it, and what happens when we look away.”
Psychology Today
A #1 New York Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller
An Indie Next Bestseller
A New York Times Bestseller in Audio
A BookPage Best Books of the Year
A Scientific American Magazine Pick of 2025's Best Books
An NPR Best Book of 2025
John Green, acclaimed author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world's deadliest infectious disease.
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 health-care 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.
Praise