The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea

Beginning at the beginning and reading through it, I felt that the first chapters, on nineteenth-century Europe, seemed rather clumsy: a history of ideas with very little context. The archival research and the personal knowledge broke through, and I was captivated by the power of a teacher familiar in his bones with everything he discusses. Paradoxically, however, the ubiquity of eugenic ideas provided the stimulus for much of the science of human genetics.