John Green is known for a great number of things. He is a long-time YouTuber with his brother Hank. He is also a best-selling author of YA fiction novels and, in recent years, has delved into non-fiction first with The Anthropocene Reviewed and now with Everything is Tuberculosis.

I had previously listened to The Anthropocene Reviewed in 2023. Anthropocene takes the form of a series of essays ranking everything from Diet Dr. Pepper and Canadian Geese to Air Conditioning and Halley’s Comet on a 5-star scale. That book, which started out life as a podcast, brought a combination of humor, unique observations, and personal anecdotes to bear on the nature of the human condition.

With Everything is Tuberculosis, Green brings many of those same qualities to a disease that has an oft-romanticized past and some people may think of as being something for the history books, but is in actuality one of the deadliest infectious diseases still with humanity in the 21st century.

Green uses storytelling to examine the history and the present of Tuberculosis. Much of the book is framed around the story of Henry, a young man from Sierra Leone who suffered from a particularly difficult case of multi-drug-resistant TB, whom Green met on a trip to the country.

Through the use of Green’s storytelling narrative, he presents the case that TB is as persistent as it is, not because humanity has not developed ways to combat it, but rather due to the inherent injustice, inequality, and societal stigma that continues to exist in the world surrounding things like access to care, distribution of medical supplies, and societal narratives.

Green manages to weave this urgent call to action for making systemic changes today with an examination of the long history of TB. Walking through its history of being seen as a disease of the rich and of artists, its impacts on fashion, writing, and art, and the way it reshaped the world by creating whole cities and industries.

I don’t read a ton of non-fiction, but non-fiction like this is something that I always want to get behind. Between the easily digestible length, the well-structured narrative style, and the clarity of the message, I can easily say this is a book that just about everyone should read.