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ABOUT THE BOOK
NO SPOILERSEverything Is Tuberculosis is nonfiction, written in the first person by the novelist John Green, and it asks why a disease that has been curable since the mid-1950s still killed over a million people in 2023. Green's way into that question is Henry Reider, a patient he meets at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. Henry walks Green around the hospital and looks about nine, but a doctor explains that he is seventeen, small from growing up malnourished and from tuberculosis, and that the staff are almost certain his antibiotics will fail. The book follows Henry and his mother, Isatu, through years of illness and treatment in Sierra Leone, and it braids their story with the long history of TB: how people explained it, romanticized it, blamed it on its victims, and finally found a cure, from James Watt's efforts to save his son to Robert Koch's discovery of the bacterium and the drugs of the 1940s and 1950s. Green also writes about his own family, his anxiety and OCD, and his own obsession with the disease. His wife, Sarah, jokes that in his mind "everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything."
Free Battle of the Books questions for Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
SPOILERSEvery one of these has the same answer, and that is the point. In a real battle the question is read aloud with a dozen other books in play, and students have a few seconds to place it. Here is what a battle might ask about Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. Use them as a quiz, a trivia round, or BOTB practice.
Where in the book they come from
- Early in the book
In what book does a New Jersey hatmaker find frontier caps buggy and straw hats leaky?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
John B. Stetson, a New Jersey hatmaker with consumption, regained his health in St. Joseph, Missouri, and noticed that fur traders wore bug-infested, brimless coonskin caps while others wore wide-brimmed straw hats that leaked in the rain. After returning to the northeast, he created a new hat that came to be known as the cowboy hat.
- First half
In what book does a mother serve sugar, milk, and curry because there is no money for rice?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
While Isatu was trying to raise money for Favor's surgery, some days there was nothing to eat when her children came home, so she made them sugar and milk and curry with no rice. She remembers praying for more food because she could see how hungry they were.
- First half
In what book does a prince buy a print of a photograph made from five negatives?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
In 1858, Henry Peach Robinson combined five different photographic negatives to create Fading Away, an image of a pale young woman having a "good death." Many Victorian viewers were scandalized because it looked so real, but others were charmed, and Prince Albert bought a print.
- Second half
In what book would a German scientist be bummed that a milk process isn't named for him?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
In a footnote, John Green explains that eliminating the risk of bovine TB is one of the reasons milk began to be pasteurized. He jokes that Dr. Robert Koch, who identified the TB bacterium, would no doubt be bummed to learn that we don't call it "Kochizing" milk.
- Second half
In what book does a writer pull his own pill bottle from his backpack to show a patient?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
At Lakka, John Green met a depressed young man in his early twenties who was struggling to take his medication, so he pulled out his own bottle of the pills he takes daily for OCD and depression and admitted that he also finds it hard to keep taking them. The young man encouraged him to think of his family and his future, and John encouraged him to do the same.
- Near the end
In what book does a patient wear his sunglasses upside down to make others laugh?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
Before his treatment failed, Henry rapped and danced in the hallways at Lakka and wore his sunglasses upside down to make the other patients laugh, and one nurse called him "Our happy boy." When he learned the injectables had failed, he turned sullen and angry, and there was no more rapping, dancing, or upside-down sunglasses.
