Summary

Wilkerson opens the book with a preface: “The Man in the Crowd.” She describes a famous photograph taken at a shipyard in Germany in 1936. In the photo, hundreds of workers, except for one man believed to be August Landmesser, salute Hitler. Wilkerson notes he is the only one on the right side of history, empathetic to the lower caste: the scapegoated minority.

In Chapter 1, Wilkerson describes an intense heat wave in the summer of 2016 in Siberia. Ice thawed to reveal deer carcasses frozen in 1941 which contained toxic pathogens from World War II. These pathogens spread to the land, the deer, and the farmers who became ill. Wilkerson compares the pathogen to human hatred in this century, which never truly died, only lay in wait.

She then describes the 2016 election in the United States of America, noting how an inexperienced, coarse celebrity — Donald Trump...