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| COMPELLING--THE ZEAL OF AN AVENGER. Investigative journalist Edwin Black compellingly argues that the ethnic-cleansing movement that culminated in Nazi Germany's death camps during World War II was the realization of a particularly ugly American dream. Black, whose mother lived under Nazi rule in Poland, writes here with the zeal of an avenger,
Gregory Mott
Washington Post Book World
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| A BOMBSHELL. In this bombshell of investigative journalism, author Edwin Black reveals that eugenics was extensive, systematic, well-funded, and supported by major political and intellectual leaders. Perhaps most startling, eugenics directly inspired the rise of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany … This chilling and well-researched book is highly recommended.
Gregg Sapp
Library Journal
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| CHILLING. Chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States.
Daniel Kevles
New York Times Book Review
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| SCARY AND NECESSARY. Edwin Black is a dangerous man. He tells us things we don’t want to hear. His groundbreaking new book, War Against the Weak...is a scary and necessary book.
Adrienne Miller
Esquire Magazine
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| SHOCKING AND GRIPPING. An impressive job, and the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping.
Starred Review
Publishers Weekly
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| IMPRESSIVE. Impressive, probably the history of eugenics for the foreseeable future.
Ray Olson
Booklist
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| AMBITIOUS. RICHLY DETAILED. War Against the Weak is a much more ambitious undertaking. Edwin Black is on a mission ... He's written a serious, thoroughly documented study. The scope of the book is impressive—it spans 150 years and reaches into the archives of four countries—and it contains some remarkable new data and sharp insights … Black has the right credentials to "tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world." … The author brings a critical sensibility to his work, morally anchored in his parents' harrowing escape from the Nazis.
Tony Platt
Los Angeles Times Book Review
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| FIERCE. A PRODIGIOUS FEAT OF REPORTING War Against the Weak offers a fierce, compelling, overlong account of how American ideas helped inspire -- if that's the right word -- Hitler's Reich. … War Against the Weak is well told and extraordinarily sad. It represents a prodigious feat of reporting, as Black has trolled every archive and read every letter (and published excerpts from far too many of them). And it is a very persuasive book.
David Plotz
Mother Jones Magazine
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| SENSATIONAL. At the beginning of the last century, American scientists, politicians and livestock breeders decided to "create a superior Nordic race." Sixty-thousand men and women, most of them poor or of color, underwent compulsory sterilization - an idea that stimulated the Nazi's eugenics program. The full extent of this medical crime has been described by American journalist Edwin Black in a sensational book.
Paul Ranier
Der Spiegel
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| HAIR-RAISER AND EYE OPENER. A hair-raiser and an eye-opener ... contains details so vivid and horrid that one can hardly believe them or bear to read them. ... This is an important book, filled with little-known facts about how some of our most esteemed institutions and professionals have funded and practiced very bad science, if it was science at all, and how this pseudoscience permeated much of the world's thinking and led to the atrocities of a world war.
Nancy Schapiro
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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| MOST CHILLING. War Against the Weak is filled with tale after tale of arrogance, ignorance, and cruelty — accounts that Black wisely allows the eugenicists to relate in their own words…. Perhaps most chilling, though, were the ways in which American eugenicists influenced their German counterparts.
Carl Zimmer
Discovery
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| MINDBLOWING. Mindblowing ... Combining gripping narrative with corroborating facts and figures, Black connects the dots to what many know, at best, piecemeal: that the racist American pseudoscience of eugenics, pioneered in the first three decades of the 20th century, provided the basis of Hitler's quest for a so-called Master Race.
Cynthia Dettelbach
Cleveland Jewish News
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| WELL-DOCUMENTED. COMPREHENSIVE. An important, well-documented, comprehensive exposition of a story not known to most Americans, about a perversion of the pursuit of knowledge in the interest of race and social superiority.
Steve Courtney
Hartford Courant
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| CHILLING AND THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED. Chilling and thoroughly researched … it is a book whose message must be made known … for those who say “It can’t happen here.”
Mark Lewis
Tampa Tribune
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