everything is tuberculosis by John Green - Review
Review Snapshot:
What mood is this right for: When you want something sad but a little hopeful.
Length: 198 Pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Memoir / Medical History
Source: Self Purchased From Amazon
Where to Buy: Everything is Tuberculosis- Affiliate Link
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
1 Sentence Summary: John Green recounts the story of meeting a young boy name Henry in a Sierra Leone hospital while intertwining the unique history of tuberculosis and the global injustice that still fuels it.
My Thoughts:
I am loving John Green in his non-fiction era. I have read nearly every single one of his books and loved them all but, there has been something extra special about these last two. It’s not just the quality of the books we’ve come to know and love from John Greens. It’s like now that he’s shared all of these amazing characters with us, he’s now sharing more of himself.
I have been sitting here for ages thinking of quite the right way to explain this feeling not just from this book but from the Anthropocene Reviewed as well, and here’s the best analogy I could come up with:
If you were born in the 90’s, like me, when Harry Potter came out we were right around the same age as the main characters. We got to grow up with him, get our Hogwarts letters, fight Voldemort but, obviously we never really knew him. We couldn’t sit down and ask him what he thought of the world, what justice issues matter to him, how exactly he’s fighting world suck now. For most of us, we grew up reading John Green’s stories too. We sobbed for Hazel and Alaska. We saw our own mental health reflected in Turtles All the Way Down. But unlike the fictional Harry Potter, we now get to sit down and hear what one of our favorites has to say and thinks about the world. Now as we all approach our 30’s and 40’s we’re not just growing up with a character, we’re growing forward with a person. Unlike Harry, John is a real life human. He is still writing. Still talking to us.
Everything Is Tuberculosis reads like your best friend is telling you the most important story of their life—but they’ve also spent a decade researching exactly how we got there, and how we might fix it. The care it took to write a book like this—not just to tell Henry’s story, but to unpack the broken systems surrounding it is a feat in and of itself but, of course, it’s all wrapped in the emotional, clear-eyed prose that John Green fans know, love, and sob over.
One of my favorite excerpts from the book is this:
“Shreya died in 2018, six years after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Dr. Furing would later tell me that Shreya was rereading The Fault in Our Stars in the last days of her life, relating to the breathlessness of the novels narrator, who lives with cancer that has metastasized to her lungs.
When you write a novel you are alone in it. I wrote that book alone, sitting in airports and coffee shops and lying in bed. But when writing there is always forme a hope that one day I will not be alone — not in this work and not in the world. It is a bit like that old childrens pool game Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes and swims around the pool trying to tag someone else. “Marco,” the person with the closed eyes says, and the other pool-goers have to answer “Polo.” “Marco, Marco, Marco,” cries the one kid, adn the others reply “Polo. Polo. Polo.” Writing is like that for me, like I’m typing “Marco, Marco, Marco” for years. and then finally the work is finished and someone reads it and says. “Polo””
This book left me yelling Polo literally into the internet. It inspires you to take action. To help. To learn. And to be aware of how else our world is failing the vulnerable amoung us.
If you want to learn more about TB you can join John on his mission at tbfighters.org
