★★★☆☆ Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, by John Green
"I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine."
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
“I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine.”
In chapter 14 of Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, author John Green explains what is wrong with the book
I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine.
Now, some of you may view that as an explanation of what’s right with the book.
Everything Is Tuberculosis is what I do not want in a nonfiction book. That is, it is all about making a story out of events. Also, Green is always visibly looking to hook the reader’s emotions. “Hooking the readers emotions” is not itself a bad thing in nonfiction. It is, however, a problem when it becomes the goal of a nonfiction exposition. It should happen, when it happens, as an inexorable consequence of the facts themselves.
For instance, Green seeks to make you angry at those whose fault it is (or might be) that tuberculosis is a large and unsolved problem. Facebook and Twitter have taught us that nothing engages a reader like anger. If you want engagement, make your readers mad! Thus Green identifies villains. (Pharma execs. The bad guys are the executives of pharmaceutical companies. No points for originality, Mr Green.)
I say that I don’t like this kind of manipulation in nonfiction, but the truth is, I don’t like it even in fiction. Few things annoy me more in a book than having my emotional strings clumsily yanked.
Everything Is Tuberculosis currently (26-Jan-2025) has a 4.36 star rating on Goodreads. That’s a damn good number. I suspect it’s because a lot of readers love exactly that thing I dislike.