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Summary
Summary
From New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson , the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre "Tania."
The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing--the Hearst family trying to secure Patty's release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing "Tania" wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty's year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term "Stockholm syndrome" entered the lexicon.
The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors' crusade.
Or did she?
Author Notes
Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and is also the legal analyst for ABC News. He received his A.B. from Harvard College and is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. Toobin lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Audiobook veteran Michael brings his considerable skill to Toobin's sprawling biographical narrative tackling one of the most controversial criminal cases in American history. Michael adroitly moves back and forth between Toobin's expository elements and the colorful dialogue among the principal players involved. As Patricia Hearst shifts from diffident young heiress to fiery revolutionary to celebrity defendant eager to return to her former life, Michael doesn't miss a beat, consistently maintaining vocal mannerisms and personality quirks in his portrayal of her. Michael's chilling turn as career criminal Donald David DeFreeze leaves a lasting impression. His rendering of crime-scene detail-including multiple bank robberies and Hearst's infamous sporting-goods store shootout-never fails to enthrall. Yet he also hits the right notes in undertaking the soap opera elements of Hearst and her captors turned comrades, especially the constantly bickering husband-and-wife team of Bill and Emily Harris. Toobin's writing and Michael's performance make for an enthralling listening experience. A Doubleday hardcover. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* On February 4, 1974, two women and one man burst into the Berkeley, California, apartment that Patricia Hearst, heir to the fortune of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, shared with her fiancé, Steven Weed. They clubbed Weed and dragged a thrashing, screaming, 19-year-old Hearst into the trunk of their car. This was the start of a prolonged, violent, and sometimes absurd cross-country odyssey that led from cramped, filthy safe houses to isolated rural farmhouses. The kidnapping, travels, and trials of Hearst and her companions would draw in a variety of willing and unwilling characters, including a radical sports journalist; a greedy, alcoholic, but brilliant defense attorney; and even a high-school baseball player. The saga transfixed the nation as key moments played out on national television, including a horrific shootout and fire in which some of the kidnappers died, and during which Hearst, rebellious and unhappy about her impending marriage, appeared to embrace the cause espoused by her abductors, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. With access to previously off-limit documents, best-selling Toobin (The Oath, 2012), New Yorker staff writer and senior legal analyst for CNN, has written an outstandingly detailed and insightful account of the Hearst case and its impact. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Toobin's high media visibility and a major national campaign, including an author tour, will ensure that this book is in the news.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CAPTIVITY TALES FASCINATE US because they challenge our fantasy of self-determination. From fictional representations, like John Wayne's reaction to Natalie Wood living as a Comanche at the end of "The Searchers," to the real-life P.O.W. Jeremiah Denton blinking his Morse code defiance on television, to Elizabeth Smart's possible bonding with her captor, we wonder: What would we do or become in such circumstances? Perhaps the captivity story that has fascinated us the most is the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the subject of Jeffrey Toobin's terrifically engrossing new book, "American Heiress." The brief outline of the events will be familiar to many: Hearst was taken from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation -Army, or S.L.A. (a tiny, slogan-drunk band of revolutionaries so obsessed with guns and publicity that they seem almost pre-satirized). After being held in a closet and haphazardly coached in guerrilla warfare and revolutionary theory, Hearst declared - in a notorious message delivered in a mesmerizing combination of "breathy rich-girl diction" and "pidgin Marxist" jargon - that she was now "Tania," that she had not been brainwashed and that her captors had offered to let her go, but "I have chosen to stay and fight." She then helped to rob banks (in which one bystander died) and plant bombs until she was apprehended in 1975. In custody, she claimed that all of her crimes were committed under duress. Her lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, built his defense on the argument that she had acted out of "coercive persuasion" (Stockholm syndrome was not yet a common concept). She was found guilty and served nearly two years of her sentence before President Carter commuted it to time served. Was Patricia Hearst responsible for her crimes, or was she a victim who did what she needed to do to survive? Or is the truth somewhere in between? The story has been the subject of many books - some dozen are listed by Toobin. Also inspired by the case: two novels ("Trance," by Christopher Sorrentino, and "American Woman," by Susan Choi), a feature film, several documentaries, at least two porn movies and an episode of "Drunk History." Hearst herself wrote a book. Yet the questions remain unresolved, which is one reason for Toobin to investigate. Another is that he sees the episode as "a kind of trailer for the modern world" in terms of celebrity culture, the media and criminal justice. As in his earlier book "The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson," Toobin uses his knowledge of the justice system and his examination of the evidence to pierce the veil of spectacle and make sense of many contradictory elements. For his research, Toobin drew heavily on the extensive materials about all the S.L.A.-related trials compiled by Bill Harris, himself a former member of the group. The collection includes information gathered through private investigations, some of it not duplicated in the F.B.I. files on the case. Toobin presents his account chronologically, but inserts back stories of the players and asides on the volatile "cultural crosscurrents" of the time (the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the congressional hearings on the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the Zebra killings that terrorized San Francisco, the gas shortages and assassination attempts). He also addresses the spectacle itself, particularly the sensationalized artifacts generated by the media-obsessed S.L.A.: the Polaroid of Hearst in a beret holding an M-1 carbine, the communiqués, the security camera images of the bank robbery. His particulate telling is measured and understated, which is the right approach to such a high-mannerist American extravaganza (Guns! Sex! Money! Plus audio!). The book's real power comes from Toobin's ability to convincingly and economically evoke a broad range of people. He makes Patricia Hearst's father, Randy Hearst, sympathetic, describing how he transformed from "an overfed plutocrat whose cosseted existence could scarcely differ more" from the kidnappers into someone who listened closely to anyone who might help find his daughter, including inmates at nearby Vacaville prison. It fell on Randy because the various law enforcement agencies bungled things throughout. He was against confronting the S.L.A., which was the right instinct. The experience brought out a humility in Randy, who, Toobin writes, acted out of "his curiosity, his decency and above all his love for his daughter." TOOBIN EVEN SHOWS compassion for the S.L.A. Their munitions fetish, their inexplicable assassination of Oakland's black superintendent of schools and their delusions about being the vanguard of a revolution show them to be perverse and foolish. But as Toobin presents their individual stories, they become human-shaped and sad. Their origins in the prison-liberation movement led to a tragic case of "metastasized good intentions." Most of them got killed in a horrific shootout with the ever-ready Los Angeles Police Department. (Maybe "dictated, simply," by their DNA, "aggression, not patience, fueled the L.A. cops.") The description of that event - which was the biggest police shootout in American history and was carried on live television across the country - is shocking and definitive. Other people get Toobin's disdain, and it brings out his wittiest writing. About Hearst's fiancé, Steven Weed (who published a quickie book during the ordeal): "If there was one point of unanimity among the protagonists in the kidnapping, including the Hearst family, the F.B.I., even the S.L.A. and eventually the public, it was contempt for Patricia's erstwhile fiancé." About F. Lee Bailey making Hearst sign a release for his book, which he had already sold: "It speaks to Bailey's rugged concern for himself that he would confront a client facing 35 years." On an S.L.A. general's rush to issue a communiqué: "Like approximately no one else on earth, Bill thought the world needed to hear what the surviving members of the S.L.A. thought." As for Patty Hearst herself, Toobin treats her as a person, not a tabloid phantasm. He writes: "The threat of death hung over Patricia. Even though she was only a teenager, she faced her situation with courage and intelligence. She didn't panic or collapse." Hearst wouldn't speak with him, so Toobin gets her point of view from her book, her statements and his interviews with others who interacted with her. As he explains in his author's note, when "the evidence about her behavior and feelings is contradictory," he addresses it in the text and makes his "conclusions in good faith." He sides with Hearst when she says she was raped by S.L.A.-er Willie Wolfe. Former S.L.A. members deny this because their revolutionary feminism would never allow rape. Toobin points out that after someone is kidnapped and held blindfolded in a closet, sex can't be consensual. He suggests that eventually Hearst formed a bond with Wolfe. He also claims that Hearst fell in love with another S.L.A. member, Steven Soliah, which she denies. Toobin uncovers newly found secret letters written to Soliah from Hearst after she was arrested (and therefore not coerced). In them, her love seems unequivocal and passionate, both for him and for the revolutionary cause. Toobin's take on Hearst's state of mind is credible because he doesn't pretend clarity where there is none. On the big question of whether her actions were of her own volition after her kidnapping, there is "conflicting evidence." At first, she acted out of duress. She was traumatized in a number of profound ways. But as time went on, Toobin shows, she embraced the S.L.A. cause. "Patricia would make the same choice again and again - to remain with her comrades and avoid law enforcement." Were her actions voluntary during the bank robbery she was convicted of? That seems doubtful. But later, when she had a chance to escape during another robbery, she instead shot 33 rounds and saved her comrades from arrest. And in the following months, she made choices and committed crimes that reflected her "conversion from victim to perpetrator." What is also true, however, is that none of that would have occurred if she hadn't been kidnapped in the first place. So should she have been held responsible? Toobin doesn't condemn her for what she did. She converted to the S.L.A. to survive and then, after being arrested, converted back to being a Hearst to survive. But he does condemn "her sense of grievance, and of entitlement" when she campaigned for a presidential pardon even though her sentence had already been commuted. He points out how unjust it is that she succeeded: "Patricia Hearst was a woman who, through no fault of her own, fell in with bad people but then did bad things; she committed crimes, lots of them. ... If the United States were a country that routinely forgave the trespasses of such people, there would be little remarkable about the mercy she received following her conviction. But ... the prisons teem with convicts who were also led astray and who committed lesser crimes than Patricia. These unfortunate souls have no chance at even a single act of clemency, much less an unprecedented two. Rarely have the benefits of wealth, power and renown been as clear as they were in the aftermath of Patricia's conviction." In the end, Toobin returns to the specific mystery of Patricia Hearst, whom he finds fascinating even when incredible. Now an establishment matron attending dog shows, with all evidence of "Tania" seemingly erased, she remains complex, capable of simultaneously being a sincere convert to her surroundings and a savvy protector of her own interest. DANA SPIOTTA'S latest novel, "Innocents and Others," was published in March.
Library Journal Review
The bones of Patty Hearst's story are relatively well known-pampered heiress kidnapped by radicals joins their ranks, famously helping them rob a bank at gunpoint-but as Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) here shows, the details that flesh out the saga of Hearst and the group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) are weirder and more compelling than any work of fiction. For instance, while the group was among the most wanted in America, SLA leader Donald DeFreeze decided to recruit new members by going door to door in San Francisco's Western Addition Neighborhood. (Not only did no one he spoke to report him to the police, but he actually brought on board people who would turn out to be crucial allies.) The narrative is peppered with appearances by such recognizable names as Jim Jones, Joan Baez, future judge of O.J. Simpson's criminal trial Lance Ito, and Sara Jane Moore, who would later attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Toobin's meticulous research is the book's bedrock, but his flair for dramatic storytelling makes it a pleasure to read. Though the author never states directly whether he believes Hearst's conversion was real, he provides all of the pieces needed for readers to assemble the puzzle for themselves. VERDICT An essential purchase. [See Prepub Alert, 2/29/16.]--Stephanie Klose, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.