National Review

Wesley Smith

Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society's most vulnerable citizens.

Washington Post Book World

Gregory Mott

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.

Library Journal

Gregg Sapp

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.

New York Times Book Review

Daniel Kevles

Chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States.

Esquire Magazine

Adrienne Miller

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.

Starred Review at Publishers Weekly

An impressive job, and the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping.

Booklist

Ray Olson

Impressive, probably the history of eugenics for the foreseeable future.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Tony Platt

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.

Mother Jones

David Plotz

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.

Der Spiegel

Paul Ranier

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.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nancy Schapiro

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.

Discovery

Carl Zimmer

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.

Cleveland Jewish News

Cynthia Dettelbach

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.

Hartford Courant

Steve Courtney

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.

Tampa Tribune

Mark Lewis

Chilling and thoroughly researched; it is a book whose message must be made known for those who say "It can't happen here."

Social Biology (successor to Eugenical News)

S. Jay Olshansky

Edwin Black has written a phenomenal book in War Against the Weak. Black has taken all the skeletons from America’s eugenics history out of the closet and exposed them at a time when advances in genetics are leading some scientists down a similar path. At times I was reading the book with my jaw on the ground, astonished to read the racist and anti-Semitic views of scientific luminaries. The fact that “American eugenics had always sought a global solution” was a chilling statement suggesting that the seeds of eugenics practiced so brutally in Nazi Germany were planted firmly in the United States decades earlier. Quite simply, War Against the Weak is a blockbuster.

The Forward

Jack Fischel

It is apparent from Black's research that American eugenicists contributed to Nazi racial hygiene policy. The Nazi experiments with X-rays to sterilize their victims, euthanasia and even the gas chamber were all at one time or another proposed by American eugenicists as a means of eliminating the unfit from American life. To the extent that Black's research documents this connection between early 20th-century eugenics policy and its extreme escalation by the Nazis in the death camps, the book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the Holocaust.

Ethics and Medicine

Amy DeBaets

War Against the Weak is a sobering account of what can happen and has happened even in a free country like the United States, and is an important historical witness as we move into a new genetic age. It will surprise many readers to know what has happened in just the past century, but Black's account is fair and well documented throughout. It is, at times, very difficult to read, particularly in the sections regarding the Nazi experiments, but it is a valuable book for anyone interested in the history of eugenics and genetic discrimination and is a much-needed resource for those seeking to prevent such discrimination in the future.

National Director, ADL

Abraham H. Foxman

In War Against the Weak, Edwin Black documents the astonishing account of eugenics as never done before. He presents his remarkable research in a gripping narrative. The Nazis used the so-called science of eugenics to create a master race and exterminate Jews and others they considered undesirable. This is a must read so that this kind of history will not be allowed to be repeated anywhere again.

Executive Director, National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality

William E. Spriggs

War Against the Weak becomes a must-read because it shows the depth and pervasiveness of racist ideology. Ironically, as the book points out, America's eugenics movement helped spawn the human genome project—which now reveals that "race" is a social construct with absolutely no biological basis. Yet, as the book clearly shows, America's presumably well-educated elite can easily be convinced of the biological basis of race and succumb to a pseudo-scientific justification for America's social ordering. But, as Mr.Black shows, the consequences can expose an evil so base, it can rot a world. He carefully documents the links of the American eugenics movement to the horror of the crimes of Nazi Germany. This aspect will undoubtedly unnerve some readers, who would like to think the eugenics movement was benign. Yet Mr. Black's careful scholarship will have to make them reconsider the innocence of the acceptance of any simple racist notions by elites.

Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations

Malcolm Hoenlein

Edwin Black has again sounded an alarm that must not be ignored. His extensive, impeccable research produced findings that are deeply disturbing and haunting. The roots of the Nazis' evil eugenic policies are traced to the U.S. and England—a warning about the dangers of the perversion of science that must be heeded.

VP, National Council of La Raza

Lisa Navarrete

Edwin Black has once again shined a powerful spotlight on an under-publicized and troubling subject. War Against the Weak is a sobering and superbly documented look at how an unsubstantiated and discredited pseudoscience, eugenics, gained a foothold at the highest levels of policymaking simply because it confirmed the basest suspicions and prejudices of a disturbingly large number of prominent and well-connected people.

Founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

Rabbi Martin Hier

War against the Weak is absolutely fascinating and disturbing. The notion of eugenics and the creation of a master race was not the exclusive domain of the Nazis but to some extent may have had its precursor right here among America's most distinguished and prominent families is both alarming and frightening.

Holocaust Educator

Dr. Samuel M. Edelman

Edwin Black's newest work uncovers the core of American involvement in the pseudo-science of Eugenics that is at the heart of the decades of discrimination, degradation and death. All for the sake of bad science, thousands of African Americans, the disabled, the mentally ill, the indigent, the poor and homeless, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Jews were persecuted right here in the U.S. and specifically right here in California. The lessons of this violation of basic human rights should be learned so that we will never again do such horrible things. Black's book gives us the record.

President, Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education

Chaim Y. Botwinick

Edwin Black's powerful chronicle of the untold history of eugenics is a thought-provoking, almost surrealistic masterpiece. He articulates events that virtually transcends human comprehension and is a must-read for people of all faiths, religions or ideological orientation. To be sure, War Against the Weak reminds all of us (whether we want to be reminded or not) about the choices and challenges we make and confront as a civilized people and society created in the image of God.

Professor, author, Murderous Science

Benno Müller-Hill

Edwin Black has again written a unique and important book. Until now eugenics in the US and in Germany have not been analyzed together. One assumed they had little in common. This was not so. Their joint past was bloody and their future is disquieting.