Ted Kaczynski’s Family’s Writings
David Kaczynski
Books
Brothers (2010)
Here is a tapestry of stories about the complex and unique relationship that exists between brothers. In this book, some of our finest authors take an unvarnished look at how brothers admire and admonish, revere and revile, connect and compete, love and war with each other. With hearts and minds wide open, and, in some cases, with laugh-out-loud humor, the writers tackle a topic that is as old as the Bible and yet has been, heretofore, overlooked.
Contributors range in age from twenty-four to eighty-four, and their stories from comic to tragic. Brothers examines and explores the experiences of love and loyalty and loss, of altruism and anger, of competition and compassion—the confluence of things that conspire to form the unique nature of what it is to be and to have a brother.
Every Last Tie by David Kaczynski (2016)
Kaczynski devotes a thoughtful, affectionate chapter to each member of his immediate family ... The book is an admirable attempt to examine Ted’s early life, offering us glimpses of a more psychological humanity. Most important, David reveals the roots of Ted’s affinity for nature and his increasing alienation from a world that he saw as driven by technological advancement and a digital revolution.... [M]any of the recollections are revealingly intimate instances of a precocious but troubled boy.
A Dream Named You by David Kaczynski (2010)
At the time I began writing poetry, in the summer of 1996, I felt like a divided soul. On one hand, I was given a public image as the Unabomber’s good and responsible brother.
On the other, I endured a personal crisis as I watched my family and my world come apart.
The process of writing poetry is my attempt to reclaim and reintegrate (and also to question) my sense of who I was and am, to connect in some way the inward-facing and outward-facing aspects that presumably are needed to make a “whole” person.
In most public discourse, blocks of meaning are presented and accepted with little questioning. But in a poem, everything is up for grabs. Poets do not aim to fill space but rather to discover it — to uncover a world that is less determined, more open and alive.
The poems in this book are an attempt to trace a spiritual journey across such a landscape from loss to affirmation.
Beginnings by David Kaczynski (2022)
The desert’s storied “emptiness” is an ever-fresh variation on the theme of openness, as the poems in Beginnings attempt to show, reflecting the author’s 40-year connection with the Big Bend region (AKA, “The Last Frontier”) of southwest Texas.
Refugees in Samsara by David Kaczynski (2024)
David Kaczynski is the past executive director of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, a Buddhist Monastery located in Woodstock, NY. He previously served as executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, a statewide advocacy group, and as assistant director of Equinox Youth Shelter in Albany, NY, where he worked to assist youth and their families in crisis. During the 1980’s, he lived without electricity or running water on a remote plot in the west Texas desert where he now resides with his wife, Linda Patrik, a retired philosophy professor. Refugees in Samsara – the Myth of Boundaries is his attempt to distill through creative fiction some lessons gleaned from his life and career.
Essays
Ted and the CIA
Was my brother, Ted Kaczynski (AKA “the Unabomber”), a sort of “Manchurian candidate” – programmed to kill by our government in a CIA-funded thought-control experiment gone awry?
I hope you will excuse the provocative question – especially since I don’t know the answer to it.
What I do know is that my brother was a guinea pig in an unethical and psychologically damaging research project conducted at Harvard University where he attended college in the early 1960’s. While it is true that my brother suffers from paranoia, it is also true that he fell victim to a conspiracy of psychological researchers who used deceptive tactics to study the effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects. My brother was harmed by psychologists who recognized – at least tangentially – that they were hurting him yet who made no attempt to undo or ameliorate the harm they’d caused to their young and vulnerable subject. Thus, it would be fair to say that my brother’s paranoia had a reference point in reality.
La Linda
“La Linda” is set in south Brewster County near the Rio Grande and focuses on the narrator’s fascination with the town of La Linda, Coahuila, Mexico, and an experience he has near there.
Wanda Kaczynski
Autobiography of Wanda
Contained in Folder 9, Box 68, of Michigan Special Collections Library.
This is an account of the first ten years of my mother’s life that she wrote in 1986 ... I have no doubt that the alcoholism and abuse portrayed by this autobiography were quite real. This is confirmed by a letter from my mother’s sister Freda ... Also, on several occasions many years ago I heard my mother’s brother, Benny Dombek, speak of their mother’s alcoholism and abusiveness.