As the video begins, an upbeat, whistling introduction plays as John Green stares through black-rimmed glasses at a camera.
“Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to Crash Course,” he proclaims, magisterially.
With around 45 courses, according to its website, from religion to biology, history to anatomy, Crash Course has cemented itself as a useful tool for students and teachers.
But in 2022, Mr. Green’s expertise and fame extended to another field: tuberculosis activism. For the past three years, he has spread awareness, donated and started charities, and attended a United Nations meeting on tuberculosis. This motivated his newest, and second nonfiction novel, “Everything is Tuberculosis,” published on March 18. By following a specific case study of a Sierra Leonean teenager while narrating the history of tuberculosis, Mr. Green informs readers about the disease.
The book’s beginning and ending are both strong and meaningful. The prose is descriptive but not overwhelmingly so, and Mr. Green deftly captures the spirit of his Crash Course series, relying on formal but conversational writing that feels like a conversation with the author.
Despite the interesting topic and engaging writing style, the middle of the book feels at times like a struggle. Instead of relying on his own writing, Mr. Green feels the need to include very long quotes from multiple sources, and this reliance slows the book’s pace and makes it intimidating to read. When reading the chapters back to back, it becomes repetitive. Mr. Green can constantly repeat statistics, which becomes annoying. This is exhibited when Mr. Green referenced figures like the Brontë sisters and Frédéric Chopin multiple times within a brief period: “the Brontë sisters, after all, died of TB” and “everyone from Steven Crane to Frédéric Chopin died of consumption” on page 58 are followed quickly by: “As Charlotte Brontë put it in a letter she wrote as her sister was dying of the disease…” on page 66 and “the writer George Sand tried to find a place for consumptive Frédéric Chopin in Spain” on page 75.
Despite these setbacks, Mr. Green walks the line between light and intense, informative and personal. He addresses the issue of tuberculosis in a way that makes it feel scarier and much more real. Mr. Green is unashamed to reference his diagnosis with OCD and depression, as well as his medication for both diagnoses, to compare the stigma behind tuberculosis patients and the continued stigma on mental health. Mr. Green speaks of his own experience skipping pills, writing, “I offered that maybe stigma has something to do with it — I feel like I am dependent upon the drugs, like I am not self-sufficient in the way I am supposed to be.”
To me, tuberculosis has always felt distant. I don’t know exactly when I learned of it, but all I knew for a very long time was that it was a disease that affected the lungs. This book bridged the gap. As I read “Everything is Tuberculosis,” I realized that, without knowing it, I had seen examples of it everywhere: the classical music I listened to was composed by a person infected with tuberculosis. The time I saw “consumption” on a death record during genealogical research was someone who died of tuberculosis. TV show and movie references and imagery. Everything really was tuberculosis.
