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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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