Gross injustice wrought by pseudo-science seen intimately from the inside.
A dip into the appalling archives of an American movement to institutionalize the “feeble-minded” that persisted well into the 1970s.
Pulitzer-winner D’Antonio (Atomic Harvest, 1993, etc.) efficiently takes readers unfamiliar with eugenics as an outgrowth of the Progressive political movement through some hair-raising background. Beginning around 1900, scientists posited that intelligence levels and mental defects were 100% genetically transferable (i.e., inherited), a contention that resulted in a mass scare. If allowed to roam society unsterilized and reproduce, Americans concluded, “substandards” would eventually reduce us literally to a nation of babbling idiots. The eventual result, D’Antonio reminds (as hard as it is to believe), was that nascent Nazi movement in Germany actually looked to the US as a model for control of the genetically unfit, later adding its own unique ethnic perspectives. The author then zeroes in on Fred Boyce, a kid in Massachusetts shuttled from one foster home to another and finally, in 1949, committed to the state’s Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded along with many other “typical morons” who today would be recognized as completely normal kids whose speech, learning, and/or physical disabilities set them apart. But in the mid-20th century, D’Antonio notes, “Across the nation, 84 institutions housed a total of 150,000 children and 26 more state schools were under construction.” Boyce’s years of ordeal are documented along with the parallel struggles of several close buddies as they fought to overcome abuse, neglect, and eternal ennui to break free of the Fernald pigeonhole and reenter society as husbands and fathers. As a crowning indignity, it was revealed only a decade ago, Fred and other members of Fernald’s Science Club were at one time administered doses of irradiated calcium (in breakfast oatmeal) without their knowledge or consent as part of an “outside experiment.”
Gross injustice wrought by pseudo-science seen intimately from the inside.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4512-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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