liv ❁'s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

Everything is Tuberculosis is a gem in the fact that it is incredibly accessible and interesting while still having incredibly educational, angering material about tuberculosis; a disease which could very feasibly be prevented everywhere right now yet, because of some hand wavy reasons (*cough* greed *cough*), still kills millions annually. While it is a more surface level exploration into the exploitative, uncaring nature of the way the healthcare system is set up, Green does an excellent job showing people why they should care and bringing attention to a problem that a lot of people really don't want to read a dense book about. This serves as a jumping off point, something to make people aware of the injustice happening in third world countries while still being light, reading like a Crash Course video, and, by the end, I would have to agree that everything is in fact tuberculosis, or at least can very easily be traced back to it.

Green's connection to Henry and focus on one patient allowed for the patients to be humanized, to not just be numbers, to be someone real, to force people to see the humanity of others, to make it harder to ignore the senseless pain and suffering, to show that a human life will always be more important than an economic profit. I was lucky enough to see Green talk in Atlanta and he, among others, is doing some incredible work spreading the word and increasing awareness about tuberculosis. While his book ended on a hopeful note, his speech was a little more depressing as recent events have caused us to move even further backwards. Still, he helps bring hope, which can be turned into direct action, which is incredibly important.

Thank you John Green for breaking the cycle of me writing a pre-review for a book I am so excited for because of how much I love the person/concept, having my pre-review be the top review for that book because I am so witty and cool (I joke), then ultimately being disappointed in the book but having my review already be so popular that I get a lot of hate for writing my review. Among the really important things you have done with this book, you have also quelled some of my fear that comes with living in an obsessive-compulsive brain.

"Imagining someone as more than human does much the same work as imagining them as less than human: Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's."

"And so we we must remember that illness is not only a biomedical phenomenon, but also a constructed one, and how we imagine leprosy or OCD or tuberculosis matters. In a place where the formal healthcare system is not particularly effective at treating an illness, it is easy to imagine how more trusted spaces and people--like churches and faith healers--can be a better bet than doctors and hospitals."

"But of course people are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood. TB intervention is an exceptionally good global health investment, but that is not why I care about TB."

Pre-Read: Welcome to my (least) favorite time of the year: reading a book I am super excited for but that I happen to have the top review for and being hyper aware of the fact that I will get absolutely flamed if I have anything negative to say.

First Impression: I see John Green has finally written the book of his dreams