Nick Kemp recently produced a history of the British euthanasia movement ‘Merciful release’ (Manchester University Press, 2002). Now, with this new book by Ian Dowbiggin, we have a companion volume that charts the history of the euthanasia movement in modern America. Opening with the Jack Kevorkian case, Dowbiggin's book has six short chapters. The first charts the history of euthanasia as a concept and a practice from classical Antiquity to the Progressive era. The next, entitled ‘Breakthrough’, covers the period 1920–40, and the establishment of the Euthanasia Society of America (ESA) in 1938. The third chapter, called ‘Stalemate’, surveys the struggles of the ESA with the Roman Catholic church in the years 1940–60. Chapter four, ‘Riding a great wave’, deals with the period between 1960 and 1975, including the reinvention of the ESA with the idea of passive euthanasia in the 1960s. The following chapter, ‘Not that simple’, covers the splits that characterized the 1970s, and the emergence of new populist right to die organizations in the 1990s. The conclusion deals with the 1990s and beyond, a period when many Americans have come to believe that euthanasia or assisted suicide would be bad public policy, and when no conclusive outcome is in sight. Dowbiggin has had privileged access to the files of the euthanasia movement, and he is keen to explode the myths that euthanasia only began in the 1960s and 1970s, and that it should be seen as a triumphalist struggle. Other important themes that emerge from his admirably brief but wide-ranging study include the way that euthanasia intersected with other progressive social causes, such as birth control, abortion, and eugenics. Euthanasia was seen “as a critical component of a broad reform agenda designed to emancipate American society from anachronistic and ultimately unhealthy ideas about sex, birth, and death” (p. 30), but also was bedevilled by perennial fears that mercy killing would be extended to people with disabilities. Dowbiggin shows that support for euthanasia in the 1900s was due more to shifting ideas, attitudes, and social forces than to changes in medical practice and technology. Equally important have been the interchangeable social, biological, economic, and humanitarian justifications that have been advanced in its support. A final theme running through Dowbiggin's history is the tension between public authority and personal autonomy, between paternalism and individual freedom. He ends with the new issues posed by September 11, and concludes that the question of “where does the freedom to die end and the duty to die begin” remains unanswered (p. 177). One of the difficulties faced by Dowbiggin is that he has to contend with a large cast of individuals (Felix Adler; William J Robinson; Charles Francis Potter; Charles Killick Millard; Inez Celia Philbrick; Eleanor Dwight Jones; Joseph Fletcher; and Olive Ruth Russell among others). Similarly, by the 1970s the picture becomes very complex as the movement fractured into numerous smaller organizations with frequent name changes (the Society for the Right to Die; Concern for Dying; the Hemlock Society; Choice in Dying; Partnership for Caring, and so on). Nevertheless Dowbiggin has coped admirably with these problems to produce a thoroughly researched and well-written history that convincingly explains the reasons for the ebb and flow of support for euthanasia, locating these movements within wider national and international contexts. Dowbiggin is unable here to engage with the recently published Kemp volume. However, comparative studies of Britain and America (and elsewhere) would seem one obvious way to provide new perspectives on “society's long struggle to deal with the grim reality of human disintegration that we call death” (p. xiv).