William Shockley was a physicist whose work in the development of the transistor led to a Nobel Prize. By the late 1950s, his company, the Shockley Transistor Corporation, was part of a rapidly growing industry created as a direct result of his contributions to the field. Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, both of whom collaborated with him on developing the point-contact transistor. Later Shockley became involved in a controversial topic for which he had no special training, but in which he became avidly interested: the genetic basis of intelligence, or, more broadly, eugenics. During the 1960s he argued in a series of articles and speeches that people of African descent have a genetically inferior mental capacity when compared to those with Caucasian ancestry. This hypothesis--which was not new and had long been discredited--again became the subject of intense and acrimonious...