Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen (Nothing to Fear) captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America, especially as that foment is illustrated in the case of Carrie Buck, a young girl consigned to be sterilized by Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Cohen follows the traumas of Buck's life, including her foster childhood with the Dobbs family, who treated her more as slave than daughter; her rape byher foster mother's nephew; and her foster family committing her to the colony. Along the way, readers meet several players in Carrie's poignant case, including Harry Laughlin, the manager of the Eugenics Record Office and leading expert in the cause of eugenic sterilization; Aubrey Strode, the trial lawyer representing the state hospital's interests against Carrie; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice notable for a lack of interest in facts, whose philosophy "left scant room for the disadvantaged and the weak." In the midst of the pro-eugenics era, the court upheld Carrie's sterilization, giving little thought to the woman who was a dedicated worker, devoted to family, and possessed of a quiet intelligence. Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an expos%C3%A9 of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM. (Mar.)