the wild saga of the kidnapping, crimes and trial of Patty Hearst
Jeffrey Toobin: American heiress (2016)
371 pages
English language
Published Aug. 8, 2016
Examines the life of Patty Hearst who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors' crusade.
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 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 bank security cameras capturing "Tania" wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from basketball star 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 across …
Examines the life of Patty Hearst who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors' crusade.
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 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 bank security cameras capturing "Tania" wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from basketball star 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 across the country; Patty's year on the lam; and her circuslike trial, 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, Toobin thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times, portraying the lunacy of the half-baked radicals and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst. He 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?--Adapted from dust jacket.
I once wrote a paper on Patty Hearst and I feel like I know more about her case than the average person, and I still found this book well-written and interesting. Toobin builds a strong case that she never really suffered from Stockholm syndrome and provides reasons why she may have decided to go the route she did.
I’m a few years younger than Patty Hearst and her kidnapping in February of 1974 had elements of my adolescent fantasies. A pretty 19-year-old held captive, who develops sympathy for her kidnappers and becomes lovers with a few of them. At that age the grubby aspects of it and the crackpot political motivations of her captors weren’t issues to me. Besides, the entire incident happened on the opposite coast.
Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress gives the details for people who didn’t care follow the case closely at the time (which would’ve been very few people) or have forgotten them since. It’s also a good description of America circa 1975. The surprising number of bombings, the relatively modest wealth of the rich, the acceptance of things no longer acceptable (Hearst’s boyfriend when she was kidnapped had been her teacher in high school).
I disagree with two brief descriptions I’ve seen of the …
I’m a few years younger than Patty Hearst and her kidnapping in February of 1974 had elements of my adolescent fantasies. A pretty 19-year-old held captive, who develops sympathy for her kidnappers and becomes lovers with a few of them. At that age the grubby aspects of it and the crackpot political motivations of her captors weren’t issues to me. Besides, the entire incident happened on the opposite coast.
Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress gives the details for people who didn’t care follow the case closely at the time (which would’ve been very few people) or have forgotten them since. It’s also a good description of America circa 1975. The surprising number of bombings, the relatively modest wealth of the rich, the acceptance of things no longer acceptable (Hearst’s boyfriend when she was kidnapped had been her teacher in high school).
I disagree with two brief descriptions I’ve seen of the book. One called it a “true crime” story. That might be technically true, but it short changes it substantially. Another said that Toobin was giving the verdict to Hearst. That makes it sound as if the book is biased from the outset, which it isn’t. Toobin does say, near the end, “... the prisons teem with convicts who were led astray and committed lesser crimes than Patricia. These unfortunate souls have no chance at even a single act of clemency, much less an unprecedented two,” even that shows the crux of the debate over Hearst and why it can still rile people forty years later: True, Hearst had many opportunities to escape yet didn’t, but being forcibly abducted, yanked from your routine life by people wielding and using guns, is hardly the same thing as being “led astray.”
American Heiress won’t end those debates; it will revive them.
Toobin, a lawyer who writes for the New Yorker among other things, has done much research and been able to access new information. He does a few things that annoy, like making the rookie mistake of calling semiautomatic handguns “automatics,” and using a cliff hanger sentence between two parts of the book (chapters, fine; parts, not fine), but the books is good nonetheless and has mentions of Desi Arnez Jr., Lance Ito, Kevin Kline, Daryl Gates, Mary Tyler Moore and Bill Walton, all involved to varying degrees.
