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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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