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329 reviews for:
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst
Jeffrey Toobin
3.83 AVERAGE
329 reviews for:
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst
Jeffrey Toobin
3.83 AVERAGE
Must be nice to be a rich white lady and be able to get your sentence commuted and be pardoned.
I thoroughly loved reading this book. For one thing, the writing was so crisp and clear. I've read a lot of Jeffrey Toobin's journalism (never any of his books before this), but he never wastes a word. He limits his editorial slant (most of the time), but tells a really compelling story with enough room for the reader to draw their own conclusions. The other reason this was so enjoyable is the portrait of the US and San Francisco in the mid-70s. I had vague recollections of the kidnapping, but seeing that in the context of Ford years, the Zodiac and Zebra killings in SF, F. Lee Bailey, and even the Jim Jones suicides in Guyana was fascinating. So many disparate things intersected during such a tumultuous and violent time in our history. But at its soul, this is a story of the injustices of our justice system - once again proving that justice has a price for those willing AND able to pay it. Only Patty Hearst knows for certain whether she was brain-washed or merely opportunistic, but she paid far less for her crimes (and they were crimes) than her compatriots. She would have made her grandfather proud for sure.
While the story of the actual kidnapping and slow conversion of Patty Hearst is fascinating, I don't think I care for Mr. Toobin's presentation, which was often a slog to get through. Interesting events are made to take a sideline to day-after-day banality which I think is done to make a point, but it being a boring point, this is not terribly useful. Hearst herself comes off as a feminist iconoclast and and terrible person, simultaneously, and her confederates more of a collection of clownish asshole murderers than sincere revolutionaries. Seems as though this would have been better as a collection of articles than a book.
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
I feel like the only way to describe this story is 'totally bonkers.' I knew the outline of the Patty Hearst story but none of the details, and really loved Toobin's telling of the tale. He does a great job of setting the scene for the country in the 70s, and providing constant reminders of the context these wild events occurred in. It's one that's best read in a quick burst, IMO, since it helps to be able to keep track of each key player and how they factor into the larger narrative.
A detailed look at one of those historical events that is too strange to be passed off as fiction. Though focused on Hearst and her transformation from wealthy heiress to kidnapping victim to radical revolutionary and then back, a lot of ink is devoted to the culture (counter- and otherwise) of the seventies to give context to the SLA movement. This provided quite a few nuggets of information: for example, in the early seventies it was not uncommon for criminals in California to receive a sentence of one-year-to-life in prison.
I didn't love it, but it's quality non-fiction, especially if you're interested in the subject.
I didn't love it, but it's quality non-fiction, especially if you're interested in the subject.
Toobin is a master, but he couldn't save the end of this book from dragging like crazy.
Still, lots of interesting stuff here.
Still, lots of interesting stuff here.
You never know how someone might react to trauma. We can guess, but we can't know. So if you look at a case like Patricia Hearst, the heiress who was kidnapped from the Bay Area apartment she shared with her fiance in the early 70s by a radical leftist group that called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), could it be possible that she would have professed to join them of her own free will? Author and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin's American Heiress examines the Hearst case, from the formation of the SLA, through Hearst's kidnapping, her year and a half with the SLA, the trial, and the aftermath. The trial brought the concept of "Stockholm syndrome", although that term was not yet coined and was never used, into the pop culture consciousness. And Toobin presents the story, as fully as he can, to try to answer the question I posed above: did she join the SLA for real, of her own volition, or was her behavior a result of her trauma?
Hearst herself didn't cooperate with the writing of the book, and one wonders if that's what leads to Toobin's all-but-stated conclusion that her claim of duress was made in bad faith. I had been only vaguely aware of the entire situation before I read this book...I knew that she'd been kidnapped, and seen the pictures from her bank robbery, and that she'd been tried for her role in it, but I honestly didn't even know if she'd been acquitted or convicted. I'd been vaguely under the impression that her time with the SLA was relatively short and that after the bank robbery, she and the SLA had been quickly apprehended. Turns out, that wasn't the case at all: she was with the SLA for a year and a half, and the bank robbery that produced the pictures we've all seen was just one of the crimes she was involved in the commission of on their behalf. And, as Toobin points out, she had multiple opportunities to flee her situation or reach out for help, even being encouraged to go home on occasion, and she refused to do. But why? That question is never satisfactorily answered.
It's Hearst's time with the SLA that makes up the substantial majority of the book. Since his prior books that I've read have been focused on the courts, I went in expecting a greater focus on the trial, but that makes up maybe a quarter of the narrative or less. I didn't enjoy this book as much as I've enjoyed Toobin's other books, in part because of his bias against Hearst (one of his primary sources were the records of another member of the SLA, which may well explain this tilt), but one thing this book does really well is setting the events in the context of their time and place. The Bay Area, where most of it transpired, had seen the hope and promise of the late 60s counterculture sour into the suspicion and paranoia and politically-motivated bombings of the 70s, mirroring the larger national climate in the same direction. I think I've mentioned it before, but I feel like US history in the 1900s outside of World War II is a sizable gap in my knowledge, and I really liked getting perspective on a time in the recent past that I was less aware of than I realized. It's a well-constructed book as his always are, but it's not as good as some of his others that I've read. If you're interested in the case, it's worth a read, but it's not worth an unqualified recommendation.
Hearst herself didn't cooperate with the writing of the book, and one wonders if that's what leads to Toobin's all-but-stated conclusion that her claim of duress was made in bad faith. I had been only vaguely aware of the entire situation before I read this book...I knew that she'd been kidnapped, and seen the pictures from her bank robbery, and that she'd been tried for her role in it, but I honestly didn't even know if she'd been acquitted or convicted. I'd been vaguely under the impression that her time with the SLA was relatively short and that after the bank robbery, she and the SLA had been quickly apprehended. Turns out, that wasn't the case at all: she was with the SLA for a year and a half, and the bank robbery that produced the pictures we've all seen was just one of the crimes she was involved in the commission of on their behalf. And, as Toobin points out, she had multiple opportunities to flee her situation or reach out for help, even being encouraged to go home on occasion, and she refused to do. But why? That question is never satisfactorily answered.
It's Hearst's time with the SLA that makes up the substantial majority of the book. Since his prior books that I've read have been focused on the courts, I went in expecting a greater focus on the trial, but that makes up maybe a quarter of the narrative or less. I didn't enjoy this book as much as I've enjoyed Toobin's other books, in part because of his bias against Hearst (one of his primary sources were the records of another member of the SLA, which may well explain this tilt), but one thing this book does really well is setting the events in the context of their time and place. The Bay Area, where most of it transpired, had seen the hope and promise of the late 60s counterculture sour into the suspicion and paranoia and politically-motivated bombings of the 70s, mirroring the larger national climate in the same direction. I think I've mentioned it before, but I feel like US history in the 1900s outside of World War II is a sizable gap in my knowledge, and I really liked getting perspective on a time in the recent past that I was less aware of than I realized. It's a well-constructed book as his always are, but it's not as good as some of his others that I've read. If you're interested in the case, it's worth a read, but it's not worth an unqualified recommendation.
While Toobin’s reporting is meticulous, I found that I was not that interested in Patricia and her comrades’ saga. I probably could have been satisfied with a Wikipedia page amount of information.