Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (audiobook)

 genre: non-fiction

I remember learning, years ago, that the illness I kept reading in my classic novels called "consumption" was actually Tuberculosis. It blew my mind, that this Romanized death was in actuality an infectious disease. From that point I knew that TB had been around as a THING for a long time but until I read this book, I had no sense of the SCOPE. I loved learning about how TB has truly impacted global history not just in the epidemiological sense but in complete societal shifts. This disease has literally changed the world. 

 John Green takes all of the big and upsetting ideas about TB and sprinkles in between the stories of intimate devastation about individual people whose lives have been turned upside down by this bacteria. It is full of compassion and hope, while being bluntly honest about the injustice that exists between people who can afford care and people who cannot - and how this divide is both socioeconomic and racial. Millions of people are dying from a disease that is curable and it is up to us to decide that it matters. This is an excellent and informative book, narrated beautifully by the author.