The Question of Unworthy Life
Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century
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Narrated by:
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Kaliswa Brewster
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By:
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Dagmar Herzog
About this listen
This audiobook narrated by Kaliswa Brewster reveals the dark history of eugenic thought in Germany from the nineteenth century to today—and the courageous countervoices
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.
Drawing on a wealth of rare archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog sheds light on how Germany became the only modern state to implement a plan to eradicate cognitive impairment from the entire body politic. She traces how eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary, and how this crude explanatory framework diverted attention from the actual economic and clinical causes of disability. Herzog describes how the vilification of the disabled was dressed up as the latest science and reveals how Christian leaders and prominent educators were complicit in amplifying and legitimizing Nazi policies.
Exposing the driving forces behind the Third Reich’s first genocide and its persistent legacy today, The Question of Unworthy Life recovers the stories of the unsung advocates for disability rights who challenged the aggressive victimization of the disabled and developed alternative approaches to cognitive impairment based on ideals of equality, mutuality, and human possibility.
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Story
The false teeth of a female serial killer from 1908, the cut-and-paste confession of the Black Dahlia killer, the newly cracked cipher of the Zodiac killer, the shotgun used in the Clutter family murders, which were made famous by Truman Capote's true crime classic In Cold Blood—these are more than simple artifacts that once belonged to notorious murderers. They are objects of fascination to the legion of true crime obsessives around the world. Veteran true crime writer Harold Schechter presents 100 murder-related artifacts spanning two centuries, with accompanying stories of various lengths.
By: Harold Schechter
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Nazi Terror
- The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans
- By: Eric A. Johnson
- Narrated by: Edward Lewis
- Length: 17 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Who were the Gestapo officers? Were they merely banal paper shufflers, or were they recognizably evil? Were they motivated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism? Did the average German know about the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables while they were happening? Exactly how was Nazi terror applied in the daily lives of ordinary Jews and Germans? Eric A. Johnson answers these questions as he explores the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work.
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Not very good
- By Christian on 05-26-11
By: Eric A. Johnson
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Ghosts of Crook County
- An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land
- By: Russell Cobb
- Narrated by: Chris Baetens
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.
By: Russell Cobb
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The Penguin Book of Demons
- By: Scott G. Bruce - editor
- Narrated by: Vas Eli
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate—otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation, and moral decline. The Penguin Book of Demons summons these supernatural creatures—and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them—across cultures and continents.