Book Review: A Journey to the Center of the Mind (Book III)

Dear Diary,
It started with this Facebook post ...

You see, we had become fans of this particular documentary and I had posted this prior to starting one of the episodes.

Then this happened ...

James R. Fitzgerald, the FBI profiler who caught The Unabomber and whose memoirs inspired Manhunt, announced I had won a signed copy of Book III.

Side note: after an incredibly long dry spell, I managed to win quite a few online giveaways. It was odd but nonetheless, I was grateful to such have had a silly string of good fortune.

Did this mean I was ready to jump inside the mind of the man who journeyed inside the mind of a domestic terrorist? Truthfully, I was apprehensive at first and I was concerned it'd become a bit of a mindf*ck. In the end, as with everything, curiosity got the best of me. Criminal Justice is a long-held fascination, after all, and who better to discuss the process than the man who lived it?

With each turn of the page "Fitz" went from a TV character to a real-life human being, and if I am being honest, an arrogant one at that. Perhaps that is a requirement of the FBI though - I mean, if your career is hunting monsters, you ought to have a higher level of confidence and emotional stability than the rest of us. Unfortunately, his career was also the wedge in his family.

I cannot imagine coming face-to-face with someone like The Unabomber ... someone who spent decades sending bombs through the U.S. Mail, terrorizing the country because he was against technology. (Can you imagine what Ted Kaczynski would do if we told him about the phone you can unlock with your face?) Three people were killed, many more were maimed. And to then profile such an individual; I can't imagine walking away from something like that without it having some sort of effect on you, mentally.

Only the last 100 pages or so touch on his work with The Unabomber Task Force, and the memoir was an interesting reflection of that. Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to be associated with the criminal justice field. After receiving such insight from the written words of Fitzgerald, I'm perfectly content to merely read about it instead. And it is for that reason alone (gaining this perspective) that I would recommend this book.