Unabomber: A Desire to Kill

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