the 1918 Spanish flu. Inside of eighteen months, a virus had killed somewhere between forty and sixty million people around the world, but Barry focused on the American carnage. At least half a million Americans, most of them young, had died. A similar culling of the far larger population in 2005 would kill a million and a half Americans. If anything like Barry described were to occur again, it would distort American life in the most fantastic ways, and leave it forever changed.
