Growing up in Lincoln, Montana, Jamie Gehring and her family had a rather strange hermit neighbour, whom they knew as Ted. They occasionally invited him into their home for a meal, but on the whole he led a solitary existence. Years later it was discovered that he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and he was ultimately arrested. Only then could Jamie and her family finally understand the true nature of their mysterious neighbour. In this honest and candid memoir, Jamie looks back on those years when nobody knew how dangerous and “evil” this man was, and examines the legacy of that knowledge. I found it a compelling and truly fascinating memoir, well-crafted and well-paced, unflinching in facing up to whether the Gehring family were ever in danger themselves, as there were certainly incidents when Ted showed his aggression and impatience – as well as more tender moments. Jamie Gehring has researched Kaczynski and his past, even forging a friendship with his brother, and so was privy to the private man behind the murderer, giving a human touch to a very inhuman character, not to exonerate in any way, but to try to understand why and when it all went so horribly wrong.

Insider's view to life next door to the Unabomber. Well-written descriptions of the conflicting feelings the author had about the changes in her neighbor over the years. I remember the news accounts of the destruction sowed and the FBI capture. Ever wonder about the kooky relative or neighbor next door? Are they harmless or a real threat? Harrowing experience to live through.

Madman in the Woods took me longer than usual to read. The beginning made me wary that this was a story written by someone on the distant periphery of the incident.

This is a very haunting account of the authors life living and growing up around the Unabomber, Ted K. Ted was an interesting child growing up and his parents attempted and tried to help where they could. As he got older he became interested in unique topics but for the most part was just a normal kid. Eventually moving in on the property right by the author Ted started developing obsessions with women and planning his attack.

This book was a very interesting read and was a good dive into how Ted grew up into what he became. It also shows the way he was around the author and their family and how they never suspected what was occurring. I thought this was a fast paced read and easy to comprehend. I personally am interested in the behind the scenes part of these tragedies such as the persons mental state, how they grew up, and other factors that lead to the bad thing happening. I think this book really did that and showed the development!

Jamie Gehring’s new book, The Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber (Diversion Books, 2022), combines classic elements of memoir and true crime in the latest take on the Unabomber and his crimes.

The text focuses primarily on Jamie Gehring’s personal experiences with Ted Kaczynski, more prominently known as the Unabomber. Gehring grew up as Kaczynski’s nearest neighbor and has many memories of him on the periphery of her life as a child. Some of these memories are endearing, and some incredibly dark. More than a general account of his crimes, the book consists of Gehring’s specific memories and interactions with Kaczynski, the social climate of the area in which they lived, and her family members’ specific relationships with him. Further, as an adult, Gehring attempts to reconcile her childhood experiences, beliefs, and biases with her own feelings of loss and grief as her family life drastically changes. She wonders if Kaczynski was more complex than she initially believed, and how her own experiences might inform her knowledge of the person she knew as a child.

There are aspects of this book that are deeply interesting; excerpts from various interviews, letters, and writings on the Unabomber case are quoted throughout, and the tension between Gehring’s timeline of events and the timeline of the Unabomber crimes makes for chilling comparison. Gehring paints a picture of the area where she and Kaczynski lived, and it is certainly a vivid one. Through the various character sketches of the people who lived/are still living nearby, one got a clear sense of the people and the interconnectedness of the area, which was a fascinating aspect of the text. The book ends with an exchange that stood out as the best part for me, and it brought to life the people involved in this case in a very immediate way.

Overall, this book falls victim to one thing out of its control: we are too saturated by content about the Unabomber. Content authored by Kaczynski himself and by others. This book reads as a text that sets Kaczynski’s crimes against the backdrop of one woman’s experience, and while that has become more and more common for true crime, it was not necessarily compelling in this context. Gehring’s experiences with Kaczynski are certainly harrowing, and there were moments where I was really drawn in, but overall, I was not riveted by this book. The memoir aspects seemed attempt to draw connections with Kaczynski’s life or experiences, but the pacing moved backward and forward in time in a way that confused me as a reader when I hoped for a carefully woven tale.

The Madman in the Woods makes for good, insightful reading, but might be more suited to those interested in memoir over true crime. In a world saturated with Unabomber material, this book had a hard time standing out for me.

Please add The Madman in the Woods to your Goodreads shelf and follow Jamie Gehring on Twitter.

Don’t forget to follow True Crime Index on Twitter and please visit our Goodreads for updates on what we’re reading! You can find Rachel on her personal @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

About the Writer:

Rachel M. Friars (she/her) is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature with a focus on neo-Victorianism and adaptations of Jane Eyre. Her current work centers on neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century lesbian literature and history, with secondary research interests in life writing, historical fiction, true crime, popular culture, and the Gothic. Her academic writing has been published with Palgrave Macmillan and in The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She is a reviewer for The Lesbrary, the co-creator of True Crime Index, and an Associate Editor and Social Media Coordinator for PopMeC Research Collective. Rachel is co-editor-in-chief of the international literary journal, The Lamp, and regularly publishes her own short fiction and poetry. Find her on Twitter and Goodreads.

A copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This was an interesting read about how someone can commit atrocious crimes but still lead a seemingly normal life to those around them. A book that any true crime fan will want to pick up. It at times reminded me of the novel "The Babysitter: My Summer with a Serial Killer".


I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review from Netgalley.

I was engrossed in the story of Ted Kaczynski after watching the Unabomber series a couple years back, so I was interested to get more information on this man and the horrible crimes he committed. </p>

<p>Jamie Gehring wrote about her childhood neighbor and what that relationship looked like between her family and Ted Kaczynski. The interviews and the stories shared were very haunting. There were a few times I had to take a break from the horrible truth of what Ted did .

Several books have already been written on the infamous Unabomber. But this book offers a different look on Ted Kaczynski's earlier life, from the point of view of a neighbor, from people who considered him a friend at some point in the past.
The author alternates between stories about Kaczynski and her own personal stories.
It was a good book

Jamie Gehring takes a fascinating look back at her childhood neighbor - Ted Kaczynski. Jamie looks at her family's relationship with the hermit living down the path from them in rural Montana. She talks to those who knew him during that time and attempts to see if there were signs from around the time of the bombings. The people she interviews are open and real about their experiences and the pain that Kaczynski brought into their lives. This is a book best enjoyed at a slower pace. I did find myself needing some time to really process what I was reading. A difficult subject matter that was handled wonderfully.

Let me start off by saying that true crime books that center killers over victims is something that I don't tend to gravitate towards, so Jamie Gehrig's look at Ted Kaczynski--the Unabomber--wouldn't be a usual choice for me. Gehrig, though, isn't merely interested in Kaczynski out of sheer curiosity; she was his next door neighbor and her family was a target of some of his crimes.

Much of this book does what likely other books about Kaczynski can't which is to situate him fully in that particular time and place. We learn as much about daily life in rural Montana as we do about Kaczynski. This has its pros and cons, it's a much more intimate view than we would have gotten elsewhere, but also Gehrig's age and position on the periphery of this means that she's unearthing much of the story through her research. It can at times feel like we're getting a unique view and at others like we're being told what happened from a distance.

Gehrig is just a few years older than I am, which means that a lot of Kaczynski's crimes occurred during my childhood and early teen years. Given that I'm not deeply invested in stories of killers, much of Kaczynski's crimes are hazy to me. If you don't know the story well, I encourage you to read a few articles first to get a refresher before diving into this one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Diversion Books for providing an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

📚BOOK REVIEW📚

Madman in the Woods by Jamie Gehring ⭐️⭐️⭐️

What do you do when you find out that the hermit who lived next door is the Unabomber? The man who brought you gifts?

You go on a path of self discovery while reconciling the fact that your neighbor murder multiple people and terrorized a nation.

This book was enjoyable and gave an interesting different insight into the Unabomber. For me, I didn’t care for the organization of the stories in the book. There was more jumping around in time than I cared for (not a consistent back and forth). However, it was still a gripping read.

Thank you @netgalley for the opportunity to read this before it came out! This book comes out in Tuesday, April 19th!

EXCELLENT!! This is another 5 star read. Jamie Gehring put her heart and soul into this book! Imagine as a kid living next to a man that you had no idea would one day become the unibomber!!

Being a true crime podcaster, I have read many things on Ted Kaczynski, but never like this! This is an account from a person who knows and lived it. This is the most comprehensive account of the beginning and the eventual end of Ted Kaczynski as we know it. She makes you feel everything she was and has and maybe still battles with. From the first page to the end, you are brought into her journey and you don't want to stop until you are done!

When we do our episode on Ted Kaczynski, I will be referencing this book! Well done @jamiegehringauthor 5 years has paid off into this masterpiece! Thanks for sharing what I know was a very difficult part of your life!

If you ever wanted to know how Ted Kaczynski thought, lived and what lead him to do the horrific things he has done, then you MUST read this book!!

A book that proves that you never really know your neighbors! A really unusual and personal look into a huge national story. I think we are all curious about what it would be like to live next door to someone like the Unibomber but there are few people who can actually write about and share the story in a way that is compelling and makes sense. Gehring is one of them,

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with a eARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

Madman in the Woods took me longer than usual to read. The beginning made me wary that this was a story written by someone on the distant periphery of the incident. There are books I've read where the author's involvement was minimal and greatly exaggerated. Gehring was somewhat periphery, but her closeness with her family and her community makes up for some of that. The rest is supplemented by her research, combing through FBI files, court records, Kaczynski's own writings, and interviewing investigators.

Gehring's roots in the story run deep. The land Kaczynski resided upon was sold from a parcel owned by Gehring's grandfather. Her mother and father built a cabin nearby and were Ted's closest neighbors. When Gehring was an infant Ted came over for dinner and games and held her a handful of times. As she grew, Ted brought her small gifts. When her parents divorced and she spent summers with her father, her encounters lessened significantly. She was not in Lincoln when he was arrested.

True crime written as narrative nonfiction is my preferred way of consuming the genre. Gehring did a good job of balancing her personal experiences, interviews, and Kaczynski's own words through diaries entries. Once I started getting into the thick of the plot, it was difficult to put Madman in the Woods down.

The Unabomber has never held a ton of interest for me. Domestic terrorism is somehow much harder to read than accounts of serial killers, maybe because it is so much more prevalent in our day-to-day in the United States. But Gehring's humanization of this story - from the Lincoln community, Kaczynski's family, the bombing victims, and Kaczynski himself - is really what makes this story.

Give this a go if you're a fan of Ann Rule or I'll Be Gone in the Dark. There is a mild amount of gore in the chapter surrounding the victims so this might be a great read for someone you know who is not into true crime.

Imagine growing up with one of the world's most notorious serial killers as your next door neighbor. Your family had him over for dinner. He carved wooden gifts for you when you were a child. You regularly ran into him in the woods on your enormous Montana property. He regularly came knocking at your door to ask the time. If you are author Jamie Gehring you need not imagine any of this, because Gehring grew up with the Unabomber (Ted Kaczinsky) as her next door neighbor.

Gehring's book is part "child of nature" memoir, part coming of age, and part "bats**t crazy" neighbor story. She is an excellent writer who is clear, concise, and often lyrical. Anyone obsessed with the Unabomber's particular brand of evil should definitely pick this up. However, I will say that it appears that pretty much anyone who ever came into contact with Kaczinky has written a book about it. Did this one add value to the canon? I'm not sure as I haven't read the others, but I did get the feeling that much of what Gehring wrote had already been covered. Still, as a wife, mother, and former neighbor, she did have sharp insight. And we get some stories that truly showed how deeply disturbed this man was - such as that he routinely would kill his neighbors' dogs, including Gehring's. (Kaczinky was pathologically adverse to noise, something that helped fuel his "rage against the machine." Barking dogs were doomed. And dogs did not like him.) It was also interesting to hear that Gehring's family could have easily found themselves on the wrong end of one of Kaczinsky's bombs - his diaries reveal that he loathed the family (which owned a noisy sawmill destroying Ted's precious forest) and came close to killing the author's stepmother and half-sister.

That said, sometimes the book felt stuffed with filler. Gehring will spend 200 pages showing us something and then do little "roundups" where she tells us the same thing again, even though we've already read it. Or hammers the reader with painfully obvious conclusions a la "There are many dangers in the wilds of Montana: mountain lions, bears, and in this case, a violent domestic terrorist." Which would be fine if this was the first page of the book, but it comes 70% in. We already know all this.

In conclusion, Unabomber aficionados will either love this or find it redundant. Those interested in "growing up in the wilderness" memoirs may like this too. Definitely worth a read.

Thank you to Net Galley, the publisher, and Jamie Gehring.

I absolutely loved this book. I thought I knew a lot about the case of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber and I was wrong. I really enjoyed reading from Jamies perspective and seeing the story told in a different light. The research provided in this book was well done and thought out. Highly recommended for Murderinos and fans of true crime.

Jamie Gehring put together a wonderful, honest portrayal of what it was like to have the Unabomber as a neighbor. While I felt some of the middle carried on a bit too much, I enjoyed the start of the book with the author's family remembering how he held her as a baby with such love and kindness as well as the author's first recollections of encounters with "Teddy" and the gifts he gave her. The book picked up pace toward the end sharing the planning that went into his eventual capture. The difficult choices her family made for the safety of countless unknown people was simply inspiring to read about. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in a good true crime book with a bit of a homesteading vibe.

The author recounts her childhood as the closest neighbor to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. It was really interesting. The author tries to reconcile the seemingly kind but odd hermit she knew as a little girl with the terrorist he was later discovered to be. She reflects back on her childhood, the time Ted spent alongside her family, the role her father played in bringing him to justice, even discovering that he killed her dog. I honestly did not know much about Kacyzinski. I remember his arrest mostly because of Will Ferrell's portrayal of him on SNL. If you'd asked me about him prior to this book, the extent of what I knew was that he mailed bombs to people. I didn't know he had been planting bombs for nearly 20 years or the reasoning behind it, and really this book doesn't go into a huge amount of detail about the bombings or victims and focuses mainly on Kacyznski himself as well as his relations with Gehring and her family. This was a great close-up, "what was he really like" view from someone who knew him during most of the time he was active as a domestic terrorist. 4.5 stars rounded to 4.

The Unabomber is a more of a mystery than other widely-discussed true crime cases, so this book had my interest immediately.

The interjections of the author's personal life are balanced between the true crime intrigue, which I enjoyed. This book reminds readers that these mythical cases occurred in conjunction to the real, "normal", lives of their community members.

The prose was easy to follow and fluid, carrying the narrative with appropriate speed. At first, the connection to the subject seemed somehow tenuous, but things built up to an intriguing and satisfying link.

If a reader is looking for a book that's just a summary of crimes and punishments, this might not be the best fit. But if a reader, like me, wants to be reminded of the humanity within and surrounding these incidents, this is a perfect read. I loved the approach of exploring who Kaczynski was/is as a person, rather than only in the context of his notorious behaviour.

This book was not what I had anticipated. The author spent a lot of space writing about her own personal life. Even though I completely understand why, I was not expecting it.

Anyway, I found it very interesting to read his thoughts. When she quoted his journal or manifesto. I felt the author did a wonderful job tying everything up at the end. Her communication with her previous neighbor and his response to her.

Seeing the “human” side and not the “monster” side of the Unabomber was what kept the book moving along.