At just over 200 pages, this is a digestible, easy read offering a short history and overview of tuberculosis, which Green centers around a young boy named Henry in Sierra Leone. Green is not a doctor or a scientist, but he’s good at humanizing what is too often dehumanized. It’s easy to think that tuberculosis is a disease of the past (known by its prior name, consumption), but for much of the world, it’s a disease of the present. 

It’s also a very curable disease, but the cure is almost never available in poor countries with underfunded healthcare budgets, and since poverty and malnutrition make TB more likely to develop into active disease, it’s rarely cured where it’s most likely to spread. He says, “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.” 

The book doesn’t address solutions. I think his main goal is awareness: get people to understand the global health implications of this disease and to understand that millions still suffer and die from it. 

Some interesting info comes out in the book, from the number of famous people who died of it (Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Orwell, Chopin, Eleanor Roosevelt) to the romanization of the disease (pale/pure skin, thin body, rosy cheeks, round eyes, young bodies and artistic minds) to the later stigmatization and shame of it once it was known to be bacterial/infectious (poor hygiene, poverty, avoidable). 

I appreciate what Green offers in this book and I definitely learned some things, making it a worthwhile read. I would have liked less repetition, more depth, more analysis of pharma companies/pricing, and more info on why an effective vaccine has been so difficult to develop. 3.5-4 ⭐️