Books about Eugenics from Amazon.com

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Price: $25.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's fraudulent roots.

In 1924 Carrie Buck -- involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated -- challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily "defective" people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the "imbeciles" condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer -- a founder of the institution where she was held -- never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision.

Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.

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Price: $14.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In a small Vermont town, an old man puts a piece of land up for sale, igniting a firestorm of protest from the local Abenaki Indians, who insist it is an ancient burial ground. To appease them the developer looking to buy the property hires a ghost hunter, Ross Wakeman. Ross is a suicidal drifter desperate to cross paths again with his fiancee, who died in a car crash eight years earlier. But after several late nights all Ross can lay claim to discovering is Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Picoult's enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate and a crime of passion. SECOND GLANCE, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history, Vermont's eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s, to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us - literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?.
Price: $3.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In War Against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early twentieth century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Ultimately, over 60,000 unfit Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes agains humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst--which holds important lessons for the impending genetic age..
Price: $12.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A veterinarian with many years of canine practice experience offers guidance to novice and professional dog breeders, emphasizing the responsibilities of reputable breeders to their dogs and to the buyers of the puppies they produce. Topics covered include: the choosing, health, quality, and conditioning of brood stock; practical DNA use, and Canine Health Information Center (CHIC) surveys and data storage to scientifically improve the selection of healthy brood stock and puppies; potential breeding problems; artificial insemination; pregnancy and its duration; embryonic and fetal activity; pregnancy nutrition; physical changes during pregnancy; stages of labor; normal and Cesarean-section births, and how to assist in both; nutrition of dams and puppies and how to recognize and prevent potential problems in both; neonatal puppy care; lactation and weaning the puppies; socializing the puppies; pedigrees, registration, and titles; and much more. Filled with color photos and line art..
Price: $7.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Here, at last, is a revised and expanded edition of this award-winning breeders' reference. Successful Dog Breeding is a book for the first-time breeder and longtime fancier alike, no matter what the breed. Down-to-earth practical information is given to cover virtually every contingency associated with breeding and whelping. Presented in a humorous format, even the most serious information is made easier to understand.

Chris Walkowicz and Bonnie Wilcox, D.V.M., are both veteran dog fanciers who bring a wealth of personal and professional experience to every chapter. Covering topics from planning the breeding (should I or shouldn't I?) to problems encountered in breeding, delivery and neonatal care, the authors offer viable solutions to innumerable problems, whether old or new. Two highly extensive appendices on breed idiosyncrasies, compiled from correspondence with longtime fanciers as well as from research from veterinary journals, complete the abundance of information offered here. All of this is complemented by original drawings by the well-known canine artist Mary Jung.
A Howell Dog Book of Distinction.
Price: $14.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the second decade of the twentieth century, an idea became all too fashionable among those who feel it is their right to set social trends. Wealthy families took it on as a pet cause, generously bankrolling its research. The New York Times praised it as a wonderful "new science." Scientists, such as the brilliant plant biologist, Luther Burbank, praised it unashamedly. Educators as prominent as Charles Elliot, President of Harvard University, promoted it as a solution to social ills. America's public schools did their part. In the 1920s, almost three-fourths of high school social science textbooks taught its principles. Not to be outdone, judges and physicians called for those principles to be enshrined into law. Congress agree, passing the 1924 immigration law to exclude from American shores the people of Eastern and Southern Europe that the idea branded as inferior. In 1927, the U. S. Supreme Court joined the chorus, ruling by a lopsided vote of 8 to 1 that the sterilization of unwilling men and women was constitutional.

That idea was eugenics and in the English-speaking world it had virtually no critics among the "chattering classes." When he wrote this book, Chesterton stood virtually alone against the intellectual world of his day. Yet to his eternal credit, he showed no sign of being intimidated by the prestige of his foes. On the contrary, he thunders against eugenics, ranking it one of the great evils of modern society. And, in perhaps one of the most chillingly accurate prophecies of the century, he warns that the ideas that eugenics had unleashed were likely to bear bitter fruit in another nation. That nation was Germany, the "very land of scientific culture from which the ideal of a Superman had come." In fact, the very group that Nazism tried to exterminate, Eastern European Jews, and the group it targeted for later extermination, the Slavs, were two of those whose biological unfitness eugenists sought so eagerly to confirm.

What are sometimes called the "excesses" of Nazism drove the open advocacy of eugenics underground. But there's little evidence that the elements of society who once trumpeted the idea have changed their mind. Dr. Alan Guttmacher provides a good example. The fact that he had been Vice-President of the American Eugenics Association was no hindrance to his assuming the Presidency of Planned Parenthood­World Population in 1962. And his seedy past did not keep Congress from providing millions of dollars in federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Nor did it stop the Supreme Court from carrying out the central item in Dr. Guttmacher's political agenda‹legalized abortion. Many of those who now admit that eugenics was evil have trouble explaining why so few of its advocates were every exposed and why so many are still honored.

As the title suggests, eugenics is not the only evil that Chesterton blasts. Socialism gets some brilliantly worded broadsides and Chesterton, in complete fairness, does not spare capitalism. He also attacks the scientifically justified regimentation that others call the "health police." The same rationalizations that justified eugenics, he notes, can also be used to deprive a working man of his beer or any man of his pipe. Although it was first published in 1922, there's a startling relevance to what Chesterton had to say about mettlesome bureaucrats who deprive life of its little pleasures and freedoms. His tale about an unfortunate man fired because "his old cherry-briar" "might set the water-works on fire" is priceless.

That tale illustrates Chesterton's brilliant use of humor, a knack his foes were quick to realize. In their review of his book, Birth Control News griped, "His tendency is reactionary, and as he succeeds in making most people laugh, his influence in the wrong direction is considerable. Eugenics Review was even blunter. "The only interest in this book," they said, "is pathological. It is a revelation of the ineptitude to which ignorance and blind prejudice may reduce an intelligent man."

History has been far kinder to Chesterton than to his critics. It's now generally agree that eugenics was born of evolution and the "ignorance and blind prejudice" of social elites. But never forget that Chesterton was the first to say so, condemning what many of his peers praised.

The completely new edition of Chesterton's classic includes almost fifty pages from the writings of Chesterton's opponents. They illustrate just how accurate his attacks on eugenists were. For researchers, it also includes a detailed, 13-page index..
Price: $8.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

; Fascinating and controversial new perspective on Hitler's rise to power; Provides startling evidence of Britain and America's financial support for the Third Reich; Suggests that the western elite deliberately supported Nazism in the pre-war period to destabilise any alliance between Germany and Russia Nazism is usually depicted as an eerie German phenomenon, the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated. Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he reveals that Hitler's extraordinary rise to power was actually facilitated over the course of a decade following WWI - and eventually financed - by the British and American political classes. Tracing events in the Third Reich, Preparata offers a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how Britain, through the Bank of England, came to exercise some control over Weimar and how Britain's financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power. Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British establishment of the time, it was a convenient way of destabilising Europe, and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia. In this way Britain ensured that it would prevent the formation of any rival continental power block. Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler's meteoric rise..
Price: $20.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

KHAN'S LAST STAND!

Jacqueline Bundy
The Trekker Newsletter

Lightning can indeed strike twice in the same place, as THE EUGENICS WARS: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume Two proves to be every bit as exciting, entertaining, and humorous as the first volume of this saga. The second portion of this engrossing story takes the reader from the beginnings of Khan's consolidation of his power, through the events that lead to his flight from Earth on the DY-100-class sleeper ship S.S. Botany Bay. From beginning to end, this novel is eminently satisfying....

Kilian Melloy
wigglefish.com

An ingenious blend of actual history and Trek mythology...Volume Two is an audacious, fast-moving conclusion to the Eugenics Wars duology, one-upping the considerable dramatic intensity and inventive accomplishment of the first volume, and bringing the story to a remarkably smooth, coherent conclusion....Cox's electric, fun-loving style of storytelling is the perfect medium to take the reader into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Michelle Erica Green
Trek Nation

Just as much fun as its predecessor, weaving Trek history in and out of recent headlines, mostly through the point of view of one of history's more entertaining secret agents, Teri Garr look-alike Roberta Lincoln....Cox's obvious affection for Trek comes through as strongly as his knowledge..
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