January’s read, Everything Is Tuberculosis, landed with the kind of narrative force that feels both investigative and deeply human.What Everything Is Tuberculosis does so well is invite us in gently through the author’s first person story, and then slowly reveal through weaving in history how much of our understanding of disease—and responsibility—is shaped by stories we’ve been told rather than the truth.
Interestingly I found it tickled some of the same subtle narrative sleight of hand as Why Fish Don’t Exist: the sense that the writer is turning a jewel in the light, showing us one facet and then another, until we realize the object itself is not what we assumed. Where Why Fish Don’t Exist questioned the categories we impose on the natural world, Everything Is Tuberculosis questions the categories we impose on people, suffering, and responsibility.
Both books remind us that the real danger lies not in chaos, but in the false order we cling to.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, Henry is the living contradiction that breaks the narrative open. He is powerful not in the sense of authority, but in the way he dissolves abstraction. The book’s political and scientific commentary could have remained academic, but Henry does not allow that. His life, observations, anger, and humor drag the story out of the realm of theory and into lived truth.
Henry embodies everything the book wants us to understand:
- Tuberculosis is not “a disease of the poor.”
- It is not “a relic of the past.”
- It is not “someone else’s problem.”
- And it is certainly not a medical issue separate from politics.
Through Henry’s eyes, we see how systems built on tidy categories—who is deserving, who is safe, who is someone we should care about—break real people. His presence forces the reader to confront the stakes not as statistics, but as human consequences.
One of the boldest parts of the book is its unwillingness to pretend that TB persists for biological reasons alone. Its persistence is a political choice—shaped by policies on housing, nutrition, immigration, incarceration, medical access, and global funding priorities.
It’s not that the world can’t eliminate TB. It’s that we haven’t chosen to. This is where the narrative connection becomes clear:
Everything Is Tuberculosis and Why Fish Don’t Exist both challenge the systems we rely on to make meaning. But while Why Fish Don’t Exist destabilized our assumptions about nature, Everything Is Tuberculosis destabilizes our assumptions about justice.
Our book club discussion homed in on the painful truths that public health had an important moment in the Covid19 pandemic, and that we missed that opportunity to gain trust in our systems by rushing “antidotes”, indemnifying pharmaceutical companies, and not empowering scientific review. Ultimately, what could have been an opportunity for society to understand that global health is human health actually further undermined faith in vaccines and the public health system.
For me this book created a sharpened awareness that if we want to improve the world, we have to be willing to see it without the categories that keep us comfortable. TB doesn’t persist because it’s inevitable. It persists because our labels make it easy for its victims to become invisible. Recognizing that is uncomfortable—but it’s also the beginning of changing it.