25. A book released in 2025: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

List Progress: 15/30

Tuberculosis kills over one million people every year, despite the fact that it has been completely curable since the 1960’s. That horrible fact is at the center of John Green’s second non-fiction book Everything is Tuberculosis, as he dives into the background of the disease, from antiquity through to the development of a cure, and the many global factors and inequalities that keep tuberculosis at the top of the list of deadly diseases in the modern day. We could live in a world without tuberculosis, but we don’t, and Green sets out to explain why.

John Green is famous for both his YA novels, including bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, and his extensive Youtube presence, creating popular videos with his brother Hank. Over the last five years, his focus has shifted away from fiction, and he has found himself fascinated by tuberculosis specifically and how in many ways it serves as a microcosm of global inequality. Before the development of a cure, tuberculosis killed both rich and poor and was romanticized as an affliction of gentle souls, too pure for this wretched world. But since the development of treatments and cures, in wealthy countries like the United States it is largely a disease of the past. But due to centuries of colonialism and racism, reinforced by present considerations of “cost-effectiveness” and what lives are worth saving, the cures never make it to the poor countries where the disease still rages. Green puts a face to the cost of this cruelty, as the book follows Henry, a young man in Sierra Leone with drug-resistant tuberculosis. The historical and scientific information about the disease is interspersed with how that global context has caused and colored the situation that Henry is in now, and it is a great anchor to keep the book out of the realm of technical jargon.

Everything is Tuberculosis has no pretenses of being an academic text. Any of the topics it touches on could fill full books on their own, and Green is upfront about being a lay person and injects a lot of himself into the telling of the story. Everything is Tuberculosis is not a textbook: what it is is a call to action. John Green is a very popular writer and Internet personality and he wants to use that position to tell something to as many people as possible. We can live in a world where no one dies of tuberculosis. It take a lot of things, complex global systems and indifferent individuals alike, changing, but it can be done. And the first step to making that change is informing people (in rich countries who do not have to see it every day) that something needs to change.

Would I Recommend It: Very much so.