Compelling; zeal of an avenger

Gregory Mott

Washington Post Book World

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.

Best book on eugenics

Wesley Smith

National Review

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.

Bombshell investigative journalism

Gregg Sapp

Library Journal

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.

Stunning, ugly details

Sir Martin Gilbert

Author, WWII: A History

Leave it to historian Edwin Black to disclose and document the stunning, ugly details of American eugenics and their partners in Nazi Germany. He has done so reliably.

Chilling

Daniel Kevles

New York Times Book Review

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

Scary and necessary

Adrienne Miller

Esquire Magazine

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.

Shocking and gripping

Review Staff

Starred Review at Publishers Weekly

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

Impressive

Ray Olson

Booklist

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

Ambitious; richly detailed

Tony Platt

Los Angeles Times Book Review

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.

Prodigious feat of reporting

David Plotz

Mother Jones

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.

Sensational

Paul Ranier

Der Spiegel

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.

Hair-raising; eye-opening

Nancy Schapiro

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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.

Most chilling

Carl Zimmer

Discovery

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.

Mindblowing

Cynthia Dettelbach

Cleveland Jewish News

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.

Well-documented, comprehensive

Steve Courtney

Hartford Courant

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.

Chilling and thoroughly researched

Mark Lewis

Tampa Tribune

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

A phenomenal blockbuster

S. Jay Olshansky

Social Biology (successor to Eugenical News)

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.

Valuable contribution

Jack Fischel

The Forward

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.

Sobering account

Amy DeBaets

Ethics and Medicine

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.

Gripping narrative

Abraham H. Foxman

National Director, ADL

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.

Connects two massive genocides

Robert Wolfe

Chief Nazi records archivist, National Archives

As the preeminent historian on eugenics, and a groundbreaking historian on the Nazi-era, Edwin Black now connects two massive genocides that will forever change our understanding of the first half of the 20th century.

Extensive, impeccable research

Malcolm Hoenlein

Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations

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 US and England — a warning about the dangers of the perversion of science that must be heeded.

A powerful spotlight

Lisa Navarrete

VP, National Council of La Raza

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.

Fascinating and disturbing

Rabbi Martin Hier

Founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

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.

An important lesson

Dr. Samuel M. Edelman

Holocaust Educator

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.

Careful scholarship

William E. Spriggs

Exec Director, Urban League

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.

Surrealistic masterpiece

Chaim Y. Botwinick

President, Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education

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.

Unique and disquieting

Benno Müller-Hill

Professor, author, Murderous Science

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.

Black warns of the dangers

British Medical Journal

The book should open an important field to a new audience. The relevance to contemporary scientific, genetic, and ethical issues is impossible to ignore. Black warns of the dangers, especially of linking economic and financial policy to science. The reader is rightly left wondering whether eugenics has gone away entirely.

Pained, almost excruciating detail

Metapsychology Review

In pained, at times almost excruciating detail, Black creates a picture of the extent to which prominent figures in American life, ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Margaret Sanger, along with such established American institutions as the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation, invested time, money, and prestige in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. 

A horror story

Robert Moore

Radstats

No short review can do justice to a book of 550 pages, including over fifty pages of notes and thirteen of sources. Although this is an encyclopedic volume it tells a good story, albeit something of a horror story.

Seminal

C-SPAN

A seminal book on eugenics.

A seminal work

Chuck Donovan

The Washington Stand

A seminal work about one of the most powerful, if often silent, motives for abortion and sterilization.

Another Major Accomplishment

Shlomo Aronson

Author, Hitler, The Allies, and The Jews

As one reads Edwin Black’s latest masterpiece War Against the Weak, we slowly learn that American scientists and elites pioneered the deadly eugenics movement and then transplanted it into Nazi Germany, where Hitler and his collaborators found scientific justification for their genocide against the Jews and other minorities. For Black, it is yet another major accomplishment.

Culprits named

Samuel A Nigro MD

Journal of Psychology & Clinical Psychiatry

The culprits … are named in this book by Edwin Black … The facts are here, for anyone to read who cares about the truth.

Portrays poignantly and excellently

Richard Weikart

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Edwin Black’s book about eugenics is a well-written, informative work, focusing primarily on the American eugenics movement, as well as its connections to Nazi eugenics. As an investigative journalist, Black excels at poignantly portraying the injustices perpetrated on the weak by elites, most of them scientists funded by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and other powerful business interests. He properly expresses outrage at the way that racial and social prejudices were clothed in scientific garb to label people “inferior,” which then gave scientific license to forcibly sterilize people, hinder or even break up marriages, and restrict immigration. Some more radical eugenicists even proposed killing the inferior. Black does a good job showing the ways that certain prominent American eugenicists waged a “war against the weak” by targeting marginalized groups for persecution.