Three Generations, No Imbeciles

Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v Bell by Paul A Lombardo, 279 pages

In 1924, Dr Albert Priddy declared Carrie Buck to be "socially inadequate", which by Virginia law allowed for her involuntary sterilization in order to protect society from her potential offspring and their undesirable genetics.  He premised his conclusion on a study of Carrie's mother and infant daughter, finding both to be feeble-minded.  A legal challenge to the Virginia law, considered a model by eugenicists across the nation, was launched on Buck's behalf, and her case eventually reached the Supreme Court.  Famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion that summarized progressive thinking on the matter - "It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...  Three generations of imbeciles are enough."  Carrie Buck was duly sterilized as a threat to public health, along with tens of thousands of other women across America over the decades that followed.

Paul Lombardo's research into the case of Buck v Bell turns up a number of surprises.  Carrie Buck was carefully selected by Priddy and his associates as a test case for the law he helped write, and her lawyer was also a eugenics enthusiast.  The evidence presented concerning Buck's family history and mental faculties were riddled with errors, errors her lawyer had neither the information nor the inclination to correct.  The author succeeds admirably at his double task of telling the story of Carrie Buck and placing that story within the broader context of the push for eugenic sterilization, although he does oddly downplay the wide acceptance of eugenics among social scientists and social engineers.  Lombardo is a legal scholar by profession, but this is not a dry account of motions and counter-motions - he possesses a considerable talent for conveying the personalities of the individuals involved, making even the villains of the narrative understandable and even likable.  His readable, relatable tale of institutional abuse and technocratic arrogance sheds a light on a key part of a dark - and ongoing - chapter in American history.

Notorious RBG

Notorious RBG: the Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, 240 pages

One of the Read Harder challenges that someone introduced me to this year was to read a biography, which is not a genre in which I typically dabble.  So I think I typed in something like "not+terrible+biographies" or "biographies+when+you+don't+like+biographies," and this one came across my path.  It was an interesting read, for a few reasons. 

The main reason is that Justice Ginsburg is, simply put, awesome.  She is incredibly smart, and put up with some ridiculous patronizing in the days when a woman had to be 20 times better than a man in order to be considered to be his legal clerk.  She was one of those women balancing professional and personal life before it was considered possible.  She was a pioneer for equal rights- angered when they were referred to as "women's" rights.   I found her logic and methods to be fascinating and brilliant; if you need to convince a panel of nine men that equal rights are important, she realized that you had to frame it around men.  This meant that many of her "women's rights" cases were arguing against laws that were unfairly beneficial to women.  Because equal means equal, regardless of partisanship or trends.  And her dissent at the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision (the one that basically threw out the Voting Rights Act) was just brilliant: "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." Basically, I'm excited to know more about this pretty amazing woman. 

But a couple of other notes... I had no idea when I started this that it was was actually based on a fan-created Tumblr page dedicated to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  So there's alot of fan art and comics and general whimsy throughout about a lady who is pretty notoriously straitlaced, which is delightful.  But if you're reading this on your phone, you may have a really hard time actually looking at said art; also because of the digital version, the formatting was outright bizarre- there would be an excerpt from a Ginsburg dissent, and then paragraphs later what turned out to be the author's notes about a bolded sentence in the paragraph.  Very frustrating, actually- especially because it took a long time to even figure out that was what was occurring.