{ "item_title" : "Everything is Tuberculosis", "item_author" : [" John Green "], "item_description" : "Click here for the Autographed copyJohn Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and apassionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human storyilluminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease. Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as amalady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injusticeand inequity we blazed for it.In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka GovernmentHospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friendswith Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit toLakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatmentand wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatableinfectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific andsocial histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shapethe future of tuberculosis.John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books includingLooking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and TheAnthropocene Reviewed. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many onlinevideo projects, including Vlogbrothers, the educational channel Crash Course and anannual livestreamed fundraiser called the Project for Awesome (P4A). John serves onthe Board of Trustees for global health nonprofit Partners in Health and, in partnershipwith PiH and the Nerdfighter community around Vlogbrothers video, has raised over $30million dollars to tackle maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. In 2023, John spoke at theUnited Nations calling for the eradication of tuberculosis cases in the next decade. Johnlives with his family in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can visit him online atjohngreenbooks.com and find out more about the fight against tuberculosis at tbfighters.org. AP Book ReviewJohn Green is obsessed with tuberculosis. He makes a strong case that we should be, too. By DONNA EDWARDS So you read “The Fault in Our Stars” or watched John Green on YouTube, and, if you’re like me, you probably thought, “I would read or watch anything this mind produced for public consumption.” Even if it’s a 200-page nonfiction thesis on tuberculosis arguing why it should be Public Enemy No. 1 and on its way to eradication. Because, in true John Green fashion, there’s a footnote on the copyright page explaining the reasoning behind the font choice for his newest book, “Everything is Tuberculosis.” (Spoiler: The reason for the font is tuberculosis. Everything is.) Early on, Green establishes that the tuberculosis is the top killer of humans among infectious diseases — a longstanding status quo only briefly disrupted by COVID-19. The slow-moving TB infected over 8 million people in one year and killed about 1.25 million, according to a recent World Health Organization report. Yet, as Green shows throughout the book, TB is curable and even preventable. The text seamlessly moves through related topics, from TB’s effects on history and fashion to the socioeconomic inequities that perpetuate the disease, and even the romanticization of an illness that, for a period, was associated with soulful poets and delicate feminine beauty. But this synopsis will seem bone-dry compared to the actual text, because the real magic of Green’s writing is the deeply considerate, human touch that goes into every word. He uses the stories of real people to turn overwhelming problems into something personal and understandable. “We can do and be so much for each other — but only when we see one another in our full humanity,” Green writes. “Everything is Tuberculosis” is reflective and earnest, with a few black-and-white pictures to illustrate a point or put a face to a name. Little nuggets of personalization consistently bring us back to our shared humanity, even in footnotes. When considering “patient noncompliance,” Green discloses his own diagnoses and wrestling with taking prescriptions. This compared with patients in Sierra Leone who, unlike Green, often struggle to get to the clinic to obtain their medication, or can’t afford enough food to take it without getting sick. On the other hand, some of their struggles are the same, side effects from pills and stigma around illnesses being some of the most common reasons patients might diverge from their prescribed course of medication, regardless of access. As one might expect from Green, the book is weirdly touching and super quotable. “Everything is Tuberculosis” is rich with callbacks that help underscore ideas, wit and humor that foster learning even alongside more somber bits. Green offers many reasons why he became obsessed with TB, but none brought tears to my eyes so unexpectedly like the stunningly apt metaphor comparing writing to the pool game “Marco Polo.” The explanation references TB activist Shreya Tripathi, who had to sue the Indian government to get the medication that would have saved her if it hadn’t taken so long to get ahold of it. Despite the death and harsh realities, it is a hopeful book overall. Green takes stock of the history, looking at the vicious and virtuous cycles that led humankind to where we are now, posing a challenge and a question rolled into one: Which type of cycle will we foster?", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/52/555/657/0525556575_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "24.36", "our_price" : "24.36", "club_price" : "24.36", "savings_pct" : "13", "savings_amt" : "3.64", "club_savings_pct" : "13", "club_savings_amt" : "3.64", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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John Green’s exceptional combination of memoir, medical history and cultural analysis, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, reveals how tuberculosis has shaped human culture, and illustrates the ways that we understand and treat the disease, and the steps doctors and researchers have taken to eradicate it.

Green traces the history of tuberculosis and the search for a cure from ancient Greece through the early 21st century. Some ancient philosophers held that TB, or phthisis, was inherited, while others thought the illness was contagious. By the end of the 19th century, the germ theory of the disease prevailed, and scientist Robert Koch discovered a test that would confirm a TB diagnosis in patients. In 1921, scientists developed a vaccine for TB. Still, it is the world’s deadliest disease, killing more than 150 million around the world since the 1950s. One million died of TB in 2023 alone, in large part, Green writes, because “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.” 

Green deftly weaves the story of Henry, a 17-year-old boy with TB whom Green met at a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019, into his larger narrative. Emaciated from malnourishment and taking a regimen of TB drugs, Henry remains positive, even though his friends and many of his extended family have abandoned him because of the stigma of tuberculosis in Sierra Leone. When Green first meets Henry, the young man’s case looks hopeless because he doesn’t have access to resources that a TB patient elsewhere might have, namely effective drugs, abundant food and clean water. 

“Tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty,” writes Green, “an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.” He briefly shares the history of Sierra Leone, tracing the impacts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s fragile health care system and economic depression. In the end, Henry’s case has a positive outcome, but it illustrates Green’s emphasis throughout the book that the cure for TB is not only in medication but also in allocating resources and health care justly. Everything Is Tuberculosis memorably probes the intersections of medicine and human emotion, while sounding the alarm on this crisis.