Customer Reviews

Unabomber: A Desire to Kill

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The story of the Unabomber is quite fascinating, but I feel it could have been told better. This book could have used some more aggressive editing; some of the writing is downright sloppy and it could have been told just as thoroughly using a lot fewer pages.
Here's an example of what bugs me (page 126):
Much of their squad's training is done by the FBI and the military. And so one comfort is that if a bomb squad gets "into a situation that was over your head, it's easy to call for help. You can call military -87th EOD.
Where's the editor?
The book is worth reading but, as I said, could have been better if some more time had been spent cleaning it up.

Everyone seemed to know about the Unabomber. There wasn't a bigger surprise than when they found the maker of some 15 bombs was a Harvard graduate living in the woods in Montana. This book helps explain why Theodore Kaczynski had reasons for his mail bombs, why he picked his targets, and it will answer that important question, "How could a poverty-stricken man, riding a bike, living in a shack with no electricity or running water, spread fear from coast to coast, and elude the police for almost eightenn years?"

This was a great descriptive book about the UNABOMBER'S whole life- from his successes in college, being a genius and going on to become a proffesor at Harvard as well as other highly educated universities to the components that made up his killing machines.

Released in November 1997, Robert Graysmith's UNABOMBER: A DESIRE TO KILL fills a current publication void. During the O.J. Simpson trials, trial watchers and media produced tomes of printed commentary. The woes of Ted Kaczynski, however, have vied for media attention with sundry other high-profile criminal trials, including those of accused Oklahomah City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols, announcer Marv Albert, and British au pair Louise Woodward. And even as opening arguments in Kaczynski's trial commence, the spotlight is being stolen by the biological weapons crisis in Iraq.

Overshadowed by this three-ring circus, the Unabomber trial may actually reap benefits in the form of a jury untainted by media spin. Unfortunately, this won't be the case with readers who turn to Graysmith's book for the facts. Although it purports to be a documentary--and is set up amid the trappings of objective reporting--both appearances are false. It is a book-length editorial, infused with Graysmith's unchecked imagination, his overhelpful interpretations, and--unfortunately--with his relentless determination to cast David Kaczynski, who surrendered his brother to the Feds and virtually certain death, in the role of beatified saint.

It's not that the book doesn't make compelling reading. It does, and that's its danger. For it is largely fiction, in which Graysmith's extensive investigations serve mostly to launch his creative interpretions of events, characters, and the relationships between them. This hand of invention first appears in Chapter 1, "The Vanishing Professor," depicting Kaczynski's days at Berkeley, where intermixed with factual background such as Kaczynski's 1967 faculty appointment, we find:

"The Professor entered Cody's bookstore, gigantic and well-lit at 2460 Telegraph. He fingered some books on calculus, and climbed to the fiction department on the second floor. He saw Conrad's The Secret Agent, one of his favorites which he'd read many times . . . . The real-life Professor continued down Telegraph and passed Channing Way. The gray mantle of fog, speeding on its way, met a blue-tinged and fading golden light. There were many on the street but the Professor had mastered the ability always to be alone, even in crowds. And what crowds they were to the unhappy man. Grim, wide-eyed skeletons. Walking skulls, their featured [were] etched away by the street lights leaving only staring eyes"(p. 7-8).

Wonderful writing--highly atmospheric--it's worthy of Dickens. But, Dickens did not pretend his writing to be other than fiction. This incident--which never happened--is used by Graysmith as visual scene-setting; he does not scruple to attribute to his "real-life Professor" actions, emotions, and perceptions invented out of the whole cloth. However, nothing but scrutiny tells the reader that Graysmith is willing to embroider in the service of aesthetic presentation. And if one thinks that insult to the truth is slight here--who cares if Kaczynski saw strangers' faces as skulls?--one ought to think twice. Invention is a slippery slope for Graysmith, and his descent accelerates throughout his pages.

For example, the author's one-sided opinions regarding the tenor of Ted Kaczynski's childhood upbringing are set forth as truth. "By the seventies," writes Graysmith, "the Professor had convinced himself that his parents were insensitive, if not cruel, to him during his formative years." However, David Kaczynski's suspicions of Ted's mental state are quoted as solemn fact: "One senses [in Ted] a psyche that fells itself terribly isolated and threatened in the world, tormented by its own complexities, unable to hold things in their proper perspective or to find comfort security or rest for itself "(p. 450).

Such claims are reinforced by sentimental diction: the elder Kaczynski is "the gentle father," while Ted consistently has "a sly smile" and "tortured thoughts." Kaczynski's assertions about parental abuse are made into delusions produced by, and in a circular way proof of, his diseased mind. Further, because Graysmith depicts David Kaczynski as motivated by none but noble motives in turning his brother in, he must bend every interpretatation to fit this sanctified portrayal. All too frequently this verges on melodrama. In a chapter actually entitled "A Brother's Anguish" appears this passage:

"Now the investigators had enough that they felt they would have to speak to David's mother, Wanda. Was this the worst moment of all for him? He had never mentioned his suspicions to her . . . . Haltingly, he told her of the last few months and of his excruciating decision, the harrowing nights, the haunting dreams "(p. 381).

By contrast, there are significant omissions of material one would have thought Graysmith compelled to include--but to do so would have embarrassed his double portrait of the crazed Ted and sainted David. A salient example is Graysmith's choice NOT to include the text of the Unabomber Manifesto, thereby denying readers the chance to study it firsthand. As those who have read it know, its level-headedness hardly suggests a madman; this is largely why federal prosecutors wish to use the Manifesto as evidence. However, Graysmith evaluates its freely in its absence, declaring it permeated with rage. He also uses excerpts from it as headings to each chapter, exposing another awkward omission for those familiar with the Manifesto's contents:

". . .a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system . . . . (paragraph 51). . . take the gypsies. The gypsies commonly get away with theft and fraud because their loyalties are such that they can always get other gypsies to give testimony that "proves" their innocence. Obviously the system would be in serious trouble if too many people belonged to such groups"(footnote to paragraph 52).

Given Graysmith's format of chapter headings, this was the obvious choice to lead the one recounting David's communications with the FBI. It is more than obvious that David's actions constitute a textbook example of the phenomenon described by his brother: the individual whose family loyalties have been weakened and subsumed by loyalty to the system. It is equally obvious, regretfully, that Graysmith had no intention of permitting his readers to make this connection, and this attitude of concealment is the book's chief handicap. Consequently, his choice to entitle the chapter on Ted "Cain" and the one on David "Abel" is not surprising, but he ought to recall that it was Cain who was the agent of Abel's death, and not the other way round.

Still, the book has many virtues, with vivid writing heading the list, in particular when the author evokes graphic images or communicates the technical construction of the many bombs. Graysmith is also a gifted illustrator, whose pen-and-ink drawings of the landscape around Lincoln, Montana and of Kaczynski's Thoreauvian cabin augment the historical perspective derived from his regional studies. Essentially, the book is a wildly uneven agglomerate of sterling scholarship and serious deficits of objectivity. What the author brings alive is impressive, but it is frequently not what took place.

Another important book is being published at the same time, Dominick Dunne's Another City, Not My Own (Crown, October 1997). Like Graysmith, Dunne has created a dramatic, highly imaginative treatment of a high profile criminal matter--the O.J. Simpson murder trials--but as a novel, Dunne's book wears its fictional status openly. One can't help thinking this would have been the wiser choice for Graysmith--it would have given his speculative talents free rein without distorting real lives. In any case, the reader must take the bad with the good--no other book exists that so coherently brings together the many strands in the Unabomber matter, regardless of the author's bias. UNABOMBER: A DESIRE TO KILL is an admitted "must read," even though the reader must beware.

I live in Lincoln, Montana and I found a number to statements in this book not true. They may be small statements, not very significant, but in a non-fiction book every statement should be lchecked for truth before being printed. We do not have a bus that goes from Lincoln to Helena. If just one statement is not true, then it makes you wonder what else in the book is not true.