My Way of Thinking: A Guest Post by John Green
John Green, vanguard of Young Adult fiction, author of The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, and modern media renaissance man now brings his passion for healthcare reform to the page. This is the story of one young boy’s fight against a curable condition and the powerful biotech companies standing in the way of its eradication, told alongside scientific and societal insights into the disease. Read on for an exclusive guest post from John on writing Everything is Tuberculosis.
Hardcover
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$28.00
Everything Is Tuberculosis (Signed Edition): The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Everything Is Tuberculosis (Signed Edition): The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
By John Green
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$23.00
$28.00
John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Signed edition
John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Signed edition
I first started writing about tuberculosis in 2020 because writing is my way of thinking. I’d just visited a TB hospital in Sierra Leone, and so much had surprised me there. For one, I hadn’t known that TB hospitals still existed. But also, I didn’t know that TB remains our deadliest infectious disease, killing over 1.25 million people per year, even though it’s been curable since the 1950s. I didn’t understand how so many people could be dying of a disease we had the technology to cure. What did this say about the world we share, and the worlds we might share instead?
To find answers to those questions I started reading about TB, including brilliant histories like Vidya Krishnan’s Phantom Plague and Frank M. Snowden’s Epidemics and Society. But I still had more questions, so I read more books and journal articles. Then I started emailing some of the people mentioned in those journal articles. I even started emailing and calling experts and physicians. All this time, I was still writing for myself, to understand how social forces interact with bacteria and other pathogens to shape so much of our shared history—not just how people live and die of diseases like tuberculosis, but also who lives and dies of them.
I didn’t know I was writing a book until 2023, when I found myself back in Sierra Leone and became reacquainted with an old friend—a young man named Henry Reider who’d lived with drug-resistant TB for many years. Henry’s story, which he and his mother generously shared with me, helped me understand that I couldn’t keep my questions about TB to myself. And so I began to weave a history of tuberculosis around the life of this one person, Henry, whose experience with TB was in many ways reflective of how and where we’ve allowed the disease to flourish.
Tuberculosis anywhere is a threat to humans everywhere; this is an airborne disease responsible for perhaps 1 in 7 deaths in human history. Everything Is Tuberculosis is the story of how we lived powerless before the disease for so long, how we eventually developed a test and a cure for it—and how in the decades since discovering that cure, we’ve allowed over 150 million people to die of the disease. But most of all, it is the story of one kid trying to survive a disease he never should have contracted. For years now, tuberculosis has driven me. I hope you’ll find it as fascinating as I do.
