Summary

In Introduction, “The Missing Americans,” Lewis describes his thinking behind the text. His previous book, The Fifth Risk, and his observations of the Trump administration inspired his writing. He thinks of writing as “find[ing] the story in the material” (xv). He hopes his reader will bring her “own sense-making apparatus” to his work (xv).

In Part 1, Prologue, “The Looking Glass,” Laura Glass was 13 when she and her father Bob Glass, “a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories,” began working on her science fair project (3). Bob was figuring out “everything that needed to be figured out about nuclear weapons” (3). Laura was curious about his studies. With Bob’s help, Laura used his graphs to create a model studying “how a disease spreads” (5, Lewis’s italics). The model incorporated “realistic social interactions,” “incubation periods,” and people with and without symptoms (7). To help his daughter...