Worthy examination of our “smartest” serial killer.
Sprawling cultural history attempts to link the Unabomber’s crimes to his educational background.
“What effects did Harvard have on [Ted] Kaczynski?” asks environmentalist Chase (In a Dark Wood, 1995, etc.), who, like his subject, attended Harvard in the 1950s, felt alienated from the institution during tumultuous times, and later sought solitude in rural Montana. The author focuses on Kaczynski’s undergraduate participation in an “ethically questionable” psychological experiment conducted by renowned behavioral expert Henry Murray during the last years of his covert Cold War research. To Chase, Murray epitomizes the postwar science establishment in his collusion with the federal government on morally compromised projects such as the CIA’s notorious hallucinogen tests, which drew on Murray’s personality theories. The author sees the young Kaczynski—smart, socially maladjusted, in flight from an oppressive family life—as an embodiment of the ’50s “Silent Generation,” seething with rage beneath a conformist veneer. Chase argues that Kaczynski’s part in Murray’s experiment, which by most accounts involved extensive verbal abuse and trickery, may have provoked his eventual homicidal obsessions. Thanks to his unfortunate Harvard experiences (grinds like Kaczynski were ostracized by the preppy students) and the ’50s “culture of despair,” which directly informed his Unabomber “manifesto,” Kaczynski was radicalized well before his graduate study at Berkeley in the late ’60s, asserts the author. Indeed, he already planned to move somewhere rural and begin a campaign of vengeance. Chase is a solid if sometimes dour writer, and does thorough work here, including actual correspondence with the cantankerous Kaczynski. Readers of his previous, highly controversial environmental writings will not be surprised by his contention that, although mainstream academia shunned Kaczynski’s manifesto, its ideas actually presage the coming of a new generation of eco-radicals. While his broad view of educational and psychiatric transformations during the ’50s and ’60s is provocative, some may feel he strays too far from his purported target, the enigmatic, murderous Kaczynski.
Worthy examination of our “smartest” serial killer.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-02002-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A dispiriting history of transgenerational violence and its victims, by a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist. The Bosket family has lived in the US for as long as there has been an American nation, first as slaves in a quiet corner of South Carolina, now as prisoners of a New York slum. New York Times writer Butterfield (China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, 1982) met one of the family, Willie James Bosketconsidered to be the most violent criminal in New York state history and dubbed ``Hannibal Lecter'' by his guards-while reporting on New York prisons. Struck by Bosket's quick intelligence and finely wrought stories of the world behind bars, Butterfield set out to study the patterns of life that brought him there. What he found, he tells us, is that ``violence is not, as many people today presume, a recent problem or a particularly urban bane. . . . Rather, it grew out of a proud culture that flourished in the antebellum rural South, a tradition shaped by whites long before it was adopted and recast by some blacks in reaction to their plight.'' In Bosket's case, as in that of his father, and his father before him, vicious crime, jail, and violent death served as a coat of arms, with the pattern repeated generation after generation, and with seemingly no way out of the cycle. Butterfield pays too little attention to the environmental causes of violence, but his book lends considerable credence to what historians and sociologists have long suspected: that the long legacy of violence in America is an integral part of our culture, and nothing seems capable of dismantling it. This book, scary and profound, is one of the most urgent of the season, and it demands much discussion.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58286-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A personally and politically authoritative inquiry into modern war crimes. Allen (Comparative Literature/Syracuse Univ.) describes and analyzes three kinds of genocidal rape practiced by the Serb forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. First, soldiers brutally rape women in public, returning several days later to guarantee safe passsage for the terrified villagers only if they promise never to return. Second, persons held in concentration camps are repeatedly raped and often killed. Finally, soldiers repeatedly rape women until they become pregnant. The acts of rape continue until late enough in the pregnancy to preclude a safe abortion. The women are then released, eventually to give birth to a Serb child. Using accounts of camp survivors and those who work to help them, Allen chooses to bypass ``proper scholarly standards of source documentation'' in order to ensure the safety of her informants and future survivors of genocidal rape. Allen concentrates on genocidal rape as it takes form in impregnating women, since this particular form of genocide is unprecedented. Further, according to Allen, it is a logically flawed system of genocide, ``possible only because the policy's authors erase all identity characteristics of the mother other than that as a sexual container.'' Allen attempts to locate genocidal rape in the legal text of international war crimes, but concludes that current conceptions are not sufficient to guarantee justice against such acts. Alternatively, she suggests such violence should be prosecuted as biological warfare, because the crime requires the perpetrator to be biologically male and the victim a biological female capable of conceiving a child. Throughout, Allen reminds the reader that her primary goal with providing evidence of genocidal rape is to stop the violence, and she calls everyone to action to end the aggression. Allen provides a general and informative map to decoding ethnic relations and a specific and essential outline of genocidal rape.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8166-2818-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
