Have yet to find a really thoughtful, well organized book on the Unabomber. I read a fair number of true-crime books; generally I rate Robert Graysmith, who has written excellent books about the Zodiac killer and the Trailside Killer. Those books were well written, full of fascinating facts and research. But Graysmith's Unabomber book "A Desire to Kill" was obviously rushed into print, trying to beat the competition -- an effort to have a title before the public before the trial, while interest in the case was high.

Much the same can be said of Mad Genius. It was also published before the trial. It isn't quite as confusing as Graysmith's book, but then it doesn't strive to be more than a quick summary of what the investigation was like and who the victims were. To make up for lack of depth and/or detail, there is an extremely long list of the evidence seized at the Montana cabin -- with no explanation for what the coded notations the FBI used stand for. And then there's the complete manifesto, appended at the end. My favorite part was the photocopy of the Kazynski's hand-written note about seeds at the very end. At least it had a personal touch.

The definitive Unabomer book has yet to be written; it would take someone like Vincent Bugliosi or Ann Rule to do it justice -- or else the Robert Graysmith of old.

It's clear right from the start that Mad Genius was written in a hurry. The writing is uneven in places, there are stylistic rough edges, but this is no novel, and if Kaczynski would like a nicer biography he'll just have to write one himself. Still, the book is timely, and important, and sufficiently well written to make for easy reading.

The book helps answer many questions about the Unabomber:

- What are the facts of the case? [ not a trivial question for such a protracted case ]

- What is the Ted Kaczynski's background? Who is he, where did he come from, could anyone have guessed that this is what he was up to?

- Why he did it -- motives, frustrations, ideas.

And that's basically all that most people will ever want to know about the unabomber and his story. The book will also give you plenty of minutia to relish over, such as his the inventory of his cabin at the time of the arrest, what "technology" (or lack thereof) did he use to assemble his bombs, and it lists his manifesto in full. The book is not expensive and read quickly -- get it, read it, satisfy your morbid curiosity! :)

Has anybody ever seen a complete list of the contents of Ted's cabin? I need to know the books he had. I've heard he had hundreds of books. What were they? Can anyone tell me what books Ted was reading? Have you noticed how the press squashed that aspect of this man's life?

This is a book that makes you realize publishers should have a new category: SELF-WHINE. Whereas Mr. Morrow is really an excellent writer, he is just so enmeshed with his own life. After the reader delves through his problems with his heart attacks (and that is sad), he has to throw in a tale about a stray cat that gets into his house. So he pulls out a shotgun to kill it. I have to admit I closed the book at this point but EVERY creature in life has the right to live, Mr. Morrow. Perhaps if you could get out of the importance of your own existence, you could see this.

Heart: A Memoir is Lance Morrow at his finest investigative journalism. He delves into the darkness of his own chest and his own past to mingle formative episodes from various plots along the timeline of his life with salient incidents in history -- uniting the events as metaphors for the heart and its machinations.

Morrow suffered heart attacks and bypass operations at the ages of thirty-six and fifty-three. His seventeen years of a second chance at life and his gracious third chance (whose duration has yet to be determined) left Morrow wondering about his place in the world.

He drifts effortlessly between past, present, and distant past -- plucking key incidents to illustrate the evolution of his life or draw parallelisms between rage nurtured in an individual's heart and the global atrocities of the Holocaust, the Balkans, Gaza, Hiroshima, and such. He commingles these brutalities with the goings-on at his farm in upstate New York: the natural interactions of animals and the role of death in their daily existences.

Morrow recounts specific deaths that have contributed to the sum of his understanding of the dynamics of mortality and the attendant issues that wrap themselves about the moment of death and remain in its aftermath. He delivers a masterful read that serves as both an autobiography and a dissertation on the role of death in life and the philosophy of recovery, of getting on with the task of living while life can be had.

NOTE TO OTHER REVIEWER: It's a memoir. It's an account of the memories of his life and the events that shaped it. It's natural the reader might feel the writer is "enmeshed with his own life."