Only the Beautiful

Author : Susan Meissner

Genre : Historical Fiction

There are dozens of stories written about the atrocities committed against the Jews and those who sought to help them. Sometimes one is written that tells some of the same things happening here in our own country. When Susan Meissner began to write Only the Beautiful, she didn’t know what the eugenics movement was. Most of us don’t either. The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children. It had been happening in California since 1920.

Over the next five decades more than sixty thousand men and women in thirty states were forcibly sterilized. And while these sterilizations diminished somewhat after eugenic ideology at its worst was exposed in the liberated concentrations camps of Nazi Germany, the practice continued until the 1970s. This is a fictional story patterned after real places and real people, and it an exceptional historical read.