Powerfully provocative reading.
A mental health and anti–death penalty activist’s deeply felt personal account of his brother, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Growing up, the author always looked up to his older brother, whom everyone thought of as a “brain.” Yet while he idolized his sibling, he also sensed that his brother “was not completely OK.” Ted excelled academically, but he had no friends and seemed at times to dislike other people. His mother explained her eldest son’s anti-social behavior as having resulted from trauma he suffered as a baby. But as Kaczynski suggests when he characterizes his maternal grandmother as “alcoholic, occasionally violent, and quite possibly mentally ill,” his brother’s behavior may also have had genetic roots as well. A year after Ted entered Harvard University at age 16, he was recruited to participate in a three-year psychological research project that involved “the calculated humiliation of subjects,” which the author believes may also have affected his brother. Several years after accepting a mathematics professorship at Berkeley, Ted quit his job and withdrew to the Montana wilderness. There, he wrote letters to his parents that raged against the threat posed to humanity by technology as well their unjust treatment of him. In 1995, almost 20 years after the first Unabomber attack, Kaczynski’s wife suggested that Ted was a likely suspect. Though shocked at first, after reading the Unabomber’s manifesto, he realized she was right and that he had a duty to not only discover the truth, but also act on it to save the lives of other potential victims. Compelling and quietly dramatic, the author’s story, which is followed by a brief afterword by psychiatrist James Knoll, seeks not to excuse his brother but rather to humanize him. As Knoll suggests, understanding the mentally ill "with an open heart" is an activity in which not only affected family members, but also the whole of society must engage for the good of all.
Powerfully provocative reading.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5980-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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