"The fascinating--and eerily timely--tale of the forgotten Depression-era psychologists who overthrew long-accepted racist and classist views of childhood development. "Doomed from birth" was how psychologist Harold Skeels described two toddler girls at the Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Following prevailing eugenic beliefs, Skeels and his colleague Marie Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents' low intelligence and sent...

Harris's startling assertion that parents have few "important long-term effects on the development of their children's personality" is at the heart of her analysis of the relative value of heredity vs. environment - the "nature vs. nurture" dichotomy.