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I don’t know that I expected John Green to write another book after The Anthropocene Reviewed. But then came Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. Fascinating and heartbreaking, Everything is Tuberculosis explores classic TB iconography (bloody handkerchief, anyone?), the influence of TB on beauty standards, and the evolving perception of the oldest known disease before turning our attention to the reasons why this curable disease still isn’t cured. Because colonialism. Because racism. Because romanticization. Because stigmatization. Because corporate greed. I found myself turning over in my mind his exploration of the way we assign morality to this and other diseases and chronic illnesses so as to both explain them and distance ourselves from them, a practice that is as uninformed as it is futile. My first introduction to Green was through his fiction many years ago, but I have enjoyed his nonfiction just as much, if not more. I highly recommend the audiobook, which is narrated by the author. 📸: In the first image, I am holding up a hardback copy of Everything Is Tuberculosis. The next two images are photos of the endpapers; one, a photo of tubercles, the other of the antibiotics used to treat TB. John Green explains the choice of end papers in a video: “We start with the disease and end with the cure, but at the same time the cure is separated by the disease by the entire length of the book, which of course represents how we’ve done a terrible job of getting the cure to the places where the disease is most prevalent.” via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DHdlmDrgy5Z/