Full name: War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

Author: Edwin Black Year: 2003 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Non Fiction, Science, Politics Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780914153290 1568582587 0914153293

In War against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black traces some of the Nazis' most horrendous crimes back to Charles Davenport's early 20th-century pseudoscientific eugenics movement in the US. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 U.S. states, while the supporters of eugenics included progressive thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg had declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst--with many important lessons for the genetic age in which an interest in eugenics has been dangerously revived. Similar books: And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Chernobyl by S. M. Plokhy The Swamp by Michael Grunwald The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome The Twilight of the Bombs by Richard Rhodes The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond Germs by Judith Miller This Is Your Country on Drugs by Ryan Grim Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius Miracles and Massacres by Glenn Beck The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash The Twentieth Century by Howard Zinn Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell American Nations by Colin Woodard Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen There Is Power in a Union by Philip Dray Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham Command and Control by Eric Schlosser The Big Burn by Timothy Egan