Better for All the World

November 28, 2005
In the early years of the 20th century, a fixation on eugenics led several states to approve forced sterilization to keep thousands of Americans from producing "morally inferior" or "feeble-minded" offspring. Bruinius's greatest accomplishment in his retelling of this blot on our nation's history is forcing readers to recognize the humanity of the victims of these policies. He begins with Carrie Buck, a young Virginia woman used by state medical authorities as a test case to get the courts to legitimize their program. At times, Bruinius's account of the events leading up to her sterilization employs a novelistic level of detail, such as recreating the mental state of participants, a technique also applied to discussing the lives of the scientists whose theories drove the eugenics movement. (These stories have their bittersweet ironies; one leading eugenicist was an epileptic, while another's daughter showed signs of dyslexia.) The tone occasionally slips into excessive moralizing when he underscores the relationship between American eugenics and Nazi Germany, but the connections are certainly there. This history isn't as "secret" as the title makes it out to be—it's been told most recently by Edwin Black in War Against the Weak
—but Bruinius brings compelling drama to the narrative that should give it broad appeal. Photos.

Starred review from January 1, 2006
Bruinius' account of one of America's dirty little secrets is that rare thing for nonfiction, a real page-turner. From the moment he begins telling the story of Carrie Buck, who at 21 underwent forced sterilization at the hands of Dr. John H. Bell at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded in 1927, to the moment he concludes the forced sterilization story of a woman known as Lucille in 1942, it is hard to put the book down. Compelling as the anecdotes he relays are, Bruinius supplements them with well-documented quotations, hard data, and the legal and legislative records of how 30 states implemented forced sterilization; how the U.S. Supreme Court, with landmark liberal justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the majority, upheld forced sterilization in a decision that has not been overturned; how Nazi Germany's eugenics laws were modeled on those in the U.S.; and how more than 65,000 people, mostly women, were sterilized against their will in the U.S. until as recently as the 1970s. He outlines how the notion of American ethnic purity and the quasi science of eugenics combined to spawn dangerous, dehumanizing practices and how the threat of resurgent involuntary sterilization looms when the concepts of inalienable rights and human dignity encounter "Darwinian reductionism and the myth of human progress."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)