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The world’s deadliest infectious disease is the subject of John Green’s next book.
Green, the Indianapolis-based author of best-selling fiction books such as “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down,” announced Tuesday that his nonfiction “Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” will arrive in stores on March 18, 2025.
In January, Green told IBJ that tuberculosis captured his attention during a 2019 visit to a hospital in Africa. The novelist met a young man in Sierra Leone who was diagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and Green bonded with the patient who shares the first same name as Green’s adolescent son, Henry.
“Like a lot of people I talked to, I thought tuberculosis was a problem of the past,” Green said. “In following [Henry’s] story over the last five years, I’ve become deeply invested in how to better treat this totally curable disease.”
“Everything is Tuberculosis” will share Henry’s story in tandem with a scientific and social history of TB.
In the United States, TB—a major cause of illness and death through the 1940s—no longer ranks high among infectious diseases, thanks to medicine and public health measures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 602 Americans died from tuberculosis in 2021. Worldwide, however, more than 1 million fatalities were blamed on tuberculosis in 2022, according to the World Health Organization.
The disease that affects the lungs remains prevalent in countries such as India, China and Nigeria. Green spoke about tuberculosis at the United Nations in 2023, the same year he encouraged his audience to pressure New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson to allow generic versions of its patented TB drug, bedaquiline, in low- and middle-income countries.
Using a similar tactic, he encouraged his audience to pressure San Jose, California-based diagnostics company Cepheid and its parent, Washington, D.C.-based Danaher, to reduce the cost of rapid tests for multidrug-resistant TB.
“Everything Is Tuberculosis” is scheduled to be the first book released through Crash Course Books, an imprint of publisher Penguin Young Readers. “Crash Course” is a popular YouTube educational channel founded by Green and his brother, Montana-based author Hank Green.
John Green’s first nonfiction book, “The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet,” debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Best Sellers list in 2021.
The author, 47, plans to sign 100,000 copies of “Everything is Tuberculosis.” For more information, visit everythingistb.com.
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Kind of a tangent, but I know that you – Dave – read your comments.
The second paragraph of John Green’s Wikipedia page starts as follows: “Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Green was raised in Orlando, Florida, before attending boarding school outside of Birmingham, Alabama.”
The problem is that this unsourced claim is probably not true. Green moved to Indianapolis because of his wife’s job and ended up staying. As far as I know, he’s never said anything to indicate that he was born in Indianapolis. And he and his brother were raised in Florida.
It’s my presumption that John’s fans *think* that he’s originally from here because his parents live nextdoor & his brother comes to Indy for family events. But it seems most likely that John’s parents moved to Indianapolis such as to be close to John’s kids and just a little bit closer to Hank and his family up in Montana. Convenient central location where oldest son & his family lives…
So if you ever have the chance to just ask John the state in which he was born & make an official record of it with an article, that would be great.
/Tangent
John indeed was born in Indianapolis and his family moved away within a year of his birth. His parents, Mike and Sydney, were married here in the mid-1970s. Sydney attended Tudor Hall School for Girls. John’s maternal grandfather, Henry Goodrich, was chairman of Inland Container Corp. Purely by chance, Sarah’s work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art brought the couple to Indianapolis.
Thanks Dave!