I’m celebrating a milestone. It was 10 years ago that I reviewed my first book for this column, Eric Larson’s “Dead Wake.” Since then, I’ve lost count of how many book reviews I’ve written, but it has to be well over fifty. Thanks for reading.
I’ve reviewed John Green’s books multiple times. First, teen drama “Turtles All the Way Down” in 2017, and 2021’s non-fiction “The Anthropocene Reviewed.”
Green’s newest work is “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.”
Green traces the impact of tuberculosis (TB) on human geopolitics, culture and society throughout history, and the efforts to cure it. While we rarely think about TB in the global west, it continues to ravage developing nations, infecting over 10 million and killing over 1 million annually. These deaths are tragically preventable; largely the result of a lack of sufficient medical infrastructure in afflicted areas and a lack of interest from the pharmaceutical industry in developing new medicines to treat and cure the disease.
Further compounding the issue is the cultural stigma surrounding those who contract TB, as they often face ostracization from their families and communities. Green puts a human face on modern TB sufferers through the story of Henry, a young man receiving treatment for TB in a government hospital in Sierra Leone, whom Green met in 2019.
“Everything is Tuberculosis” is a good read, and a much better effort than his previous non-fiction endeavor. It’s short and succinct, and I appreciated the historical, sociocultural and modern histories of disease. It engages the reader in thinking about public health and policy in ways rarely thought about by those who are not in the field. The prose is slightly tortured at times, in a way that I would describe as “earnestly and unintentionally pretentious.” Which is a fixture of Green’s writing that I’ve always simultaneously admired and cringed at slightly. Don’t let that discourage you though, if you’re thinking about picking this one up. If you do, enjoy, and be thankful for modern medicine.
• J.T. Menard is an employee of Heritage University and a former bookseller at Inklings Bookshop. He and other Inklings staffers review books in this space every week.