I remember when this came out and I was NOT in an non fiction frame of mind and it didn’t interest me at all but now that I am I decided to finally pick it up.

I have decided that these aren’t going to be completely summaries cause I feel like it is hard to describe the plot of a non fiction book lol. I am going to summarize obviously but I will also talk about what my little plebeian brain thinks about it.

And you guys, John Green is right, everything IS tuberculosis. I have read now 3 different non fiction books that bring up tuberculosis and how that has affected the subject they are talking about.

Will Hunt brings it up in Underground, Vince Beiser talks about it in The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, and you hear it mentioned in A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage.

Now I didn’t have the drive or honestly even the thought to mark down when they talked about it or what the context was so that is kinda embarassing. Maybe from now on I will start marking down when I come across something I like or something that really makes me thing. My issue is that I am listening to these books and am often doing something else like driving or working so I don’t really have that opportunity to jot anything down.

Well, this book obviously is John Green talking all about tuberculosis but a lot of it is following the story of a boy that he met when visiting Sierra Leone for other reasons completely (although I cannot remember what that other purpose was now since I don’t write anything down lol).

But this boy, Henry, looks about 7 and has been showing John around the hospital and introducing him to everyone. John thinks that he must be the child of an employee there but it turns out that he is actually 17 years old and is a patient of the hospital being treated for tuberculosis.

John talks about the history of the disease but really talks about the treatment for it. The saying is that the cure is where the disease isn’t. You don’t see as many cases of tuberculosis in the US because there are enough resources and most of us have money or health insurance to pay for treatment or if not, still able to have access to the treatment and maybe go into debt for it.

But in Sierra Leone, the access to treatment is still a fighting battle. They don’t have the money for all the testing that can happen to figure out what type of tuberculosis you have so they don’t know how to treat it properly. And if you have the antibiotic resistant tuberculosis then you have to go through lots of treatment first that won’t make it better before they decide that is what you have and move on to the treatment that should help. Although sometimes, too much time has passed and they could be too far gone to fix.

Additionally, there is a lot of negative connotations surrounding the diagnosis of tuberculosis. Before the science was there it was thought that the cause was due to wrongdoings in the past or sins of the mother. Even know people are shamed and abandoned by their family once diagnosed and even will continue to be if they are able to recover.

Luckily for Henry, his mother stuck with him through the whole thing. He was able to recover and is now a youtuber who talks about the disease and creating awareness for it.

I have no idea how to end this but I don’t have anything else to say lol.