I absolutely loved this book! I'm a fan of Toobin's in general and he perfectly looked at all facets of the case. I made sure to tell people to pick up a copy.

Although the Patty Hearst kidnapping is famous and should make for exciting reading, it actually wasn't a great story. Neither the kidnappers nor the FBI really knew what they were doing, so the narrative lacked any forward drive. The case just dragged on rather than feeling suspenseful. The author did clearly do her research, using fascinating first-person sources. The historical context was interesting as well. The author also did a good job presenting a balanced view of whether Patty's choice to join her kidnappers made her a criminal or simply someone making the best of a bad situation. However, the character backstories were interjected in way that made the story feel disjointed. The author also stumbled a little talking about LGBT characters, describing one woman as a 'militant lesbian' when she was actually bisexual and describing someone else as 'becoming a lesbian'. Good, but not great.

Full disclosure: I received a free e-copy from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Many of us remember hearing the newscasts in the 1970s about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the bizarre aftermath. Toobin narrates the back stories very well that led up to the kidnapping, as well as the trial.

Recommended for public libraries and academic libraries with criminal justice collections.

I've always been fascinated by the Hearst family, especially William Randolph Hearst, Patty's grandfather, but I didn't know much about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Toobin's account was fascinating, though I did feel bogged down by all the details a few times. Overall, it is an interesting book for those curious to learn more about Patty Hearst and her time with the SLA.

I would actually rate this at 3.5 stars, due to the author's tendency to repeat minor details multiple times (e.g. the FBI's codename "HERNAP" for the Hearst kidnapping case, the fact that Mizmoon acted as the SLA's researcher because she had a job at the Berkeley Public Library...)

As I was a child when the major events of this book took place, I've only ever had a vague knowledge of the case. Toobin's book gave me insight into the turbulent atmosphere of 1970's America -- definitely not the "good old days" of my childhood nostalgia.

His portrait of Hearst is quite unsympathetic. An innocent victim of abduction and confinement, she nevertheless seems to have demonstrated a notable lack of concern for the impact of her actions on other innocent bystanders, and a stunning lack of loyalty to her parents, lovers, and past associates. The final sentence of the book made me hoot out loud.

An absorbing and informative reading experience.

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? 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 were her actions 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.


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 as much as I've enjoyed previous Toobins, 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 his 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-motived 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 sizeable 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 interesting in the case, it's worth a read, but it's not worth an unqualified recommendation.