"A heartrending story about a young mother's fight to keep her daughter and the winds of fortune that tear them apart, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things and The Last Year of the War. California, 1938-When she loses her parents in an accident, sixteen-year-old Rosanne is taken in by the owners of the vineyard where she has lived her whole life as the vinedresser's daughter. She moves into Celine and Truman Calvert's...

ln 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. Here, Adam Cohen exposes the court's decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be "feebleminded" and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirables for the greater good of the country. The 8-1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American...

Violet helps her sixteen-year-old sister, Lily, travel to an infant asylum in Philadelphia so Lily can have her child in secret. They do not know the asylum's physician is experimenting on the girls with eugenics. After five years, both women are back in Scranton finding their way in marriage and engagement and grapple with their worth and virtue.

"American history is full of examples of discrimination in all forms, but never before has the wreckage from America's infatuation with eugenics and its state-sanctioned policy of hate toward the mentally ill been put in such personal terms. In this extraordinary debut book, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Erickson answers the questions that have long haunted an immigrant family: Why was a mother in her early twenties imprisoned and then sterilized?...