A substantive contribution to the history of psychology.
A psychologist with experience in public education limns the 20th-century conflict over intelligence that raged for decades.
Brookwood makes her book debut with a revealing and thoroughly researched history of the long and fierce controversy about whether intelligence is inherited or influenced by environment, a debate in which eugenicists played a prominent role. Convinced that intelligence is hereditary and that people of low intelligence—particularly Blacks, immigrants, and the poor—should be barred from procreating, they advocated for sterilization of women who scored low on IQ tests, showed evidence of mental illness, suffered from alcoholism, or engaged in prostitution. By the 1920s, all states had laws permitting involuntary sterilization. Brookwood centers her attention on two groundbreaking psychologists: Howard Skeels and Marie Skodak, based at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, who, in the 1930s, compared the IQ’s of children raised in overcrowded orphanages, where they were isolated and ignored, with children either adopted or sent to live in an institution for women diagnosed as mentally deficient, where they received loving attention by the inmates. In contrast to the prevailing assumption that IQ was innate, Skeels and Skodak found remarkable improvement among children placed in a nurturing, stimulating environment. As soon as their findings were publicized, they were viciously attacked by the influential psychologist Lewis Terman, who insisted that intelligence was an “innate, unmodifiable entity.” Threatening his reputation, Skeels and Skodak remained in his crosshairs until his death in the 1950s. Drawing on a dozen rich archives, Brookwood meticulously documents the scholarly dispute, which played out in journals and at conferences, and she reports many intriguing case histories of individual children, including those involved in a longitudinal study that Skeels and Skodak conducted, under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, when the subjects were adults. That study confirmed their findings; other studies, too, testified to the benefit of preschool movements and lay the groundwork for efforts such as Head Start.
A substantive contribution to the history of psychology.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-468-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
