Alex Green, a disability advocate who teaches political communications at the Harvard Kennedy School, has won the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography for his book “A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled.”
The announcement came Thursday night at the NBCC Awards ceremony in New York. Each year, the organization recognizes writers and poets for exceptional work in six categories: fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism.
Green, a resident of Waltham, said the award was especially meaningful to him because of the NBCC’s recognition of writing as a craft.
“It means the most to get that kind of recognition and to frankly just sit with your peers, the other nominees in the biography category, and all of the nominees overall, and realize that you’re part of a vibrant literary culture in this country,” he said.
“A Perfect Turmoil” recounts the story of Fernald, an internationally renowned expert in caring for people with disabilities whose views can seem both remarkably progressive and dismayingly retrograde from today’s perspective. After early enthusiasm for special education and a mid-career embrace of eugenics, Fernald later became an advocate for radical reform at institutions like the Waltham school that bore his name.
To write “A Perfect Turmoil,” Green had to fight to access some 250,000 pages of documents stored in the Massachusetts state archives — records he was initially told he could not review. He ultimately won that battle.
That trove of documents, he recalled, was stored in a chaotic manner. But it was also rich in detail — containing what he described as “the untold story of how special education began in America, a program that now serves 7 million children every year.”
That research, and the resulting biography, Green said, helped answer key questions related to the roots of intelligence testing, the link between eugenics and the Holocaust, and “how we think about and act toward disabled people in this country today.”
“Walter Fernald … built this system in that school and exported it the world over,” Green added. “[He] set the laws of states and nations and played hosts to governors and people who became president ... And so I spent the last 10 years reconstructing that story, because I think it’s so important.”
The reckoning with the issues raised by Green’s research is ongoing. In recent years, family members whose relatives lived and died at the Fernald School have encountered dead ends when seeking records recounting the experiences of their loved ones, and a report released last year — authored by a commission that Green helped lead — found that one third of the state’s burial sites for people who died in institutions are not being maintained.
In late 2025, a new state law made records available to the public if the documents are at least 75 years old or if 50 years have passed since the patient’s death.
