American Heiress is a page-turner certainly, but Toobin, a gifted writer, infuses it with much more, including vivid portraits of Hearst, her family — her mother in particular, a rigid arch-conservative — and the members of the SLA. Even if he ridicules the ideas and condemns the violent deeds of this ragtag group of revolutionary wannabes, they emerge not as cardboard villains but flesh and blood protagonists.
Mr. Toobin has used the same winning formula of delving deeply into an American crime story that had tremendous notoriety in its day and retelling it with new resonance ... The book’s legal pièce de résistance is how Mr. Bailey bungled Ms. Hearst’s defense in charges of robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, the first of several crimes for which she was accused.
In American Heiress, Toobin has crafted a book for the expert and the uninitiated alike, a smart page-turner that boasts a cache of never-before-published details ... Throughout, Toobin’s book successfully captures the unrivaled spectacle of the Hearst drama ... The Heiress has an obvious, if unavoidable, shortcoming: Because Hearst declined Toobin’s interview requests, we don’t know what she makes of all this 40 years later. Nonetheless, he conveys a sense of how much of Hearst’s life has changed.
Toobin frames American Heiress as a tribute to her resilience: what he sees as the 'rational' response of a determined survivor to a string of extraordinary challenges ... [Hearst] appears as the only ordinary person in a parade of weirdos, creeps, fanatics, scoundrels, idealists, firebrands, and outright maniacs ... Yes, the SLA were idiots who didn’t have a viable plan for changing the world, but Toobin leans so hard on the meaninglessness of their agenda that he creates the impression their idiocy was obvious to everyone around them.
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 ... As for Patty Hearst herself, Toobin treats her as a person, not a tabloid phantasm.
It is a remarkable story, skillfully and engrossingly told. Mr. Toobin turns his critical lens on every player in the cast. Nothing and no one escapes his scrutiny ... American Heiress raises questions about wealth and power, about violence and groupthink and human nature. Throughout, Mr. Toobin is fair-minded in his storytelling. Even for those readers who've long since forgotten the Patty Hearst saga, or who grew up long after it ended, this account is well worth the time and attention.
Jeffrey Toobin’s account is nuanced and well paced, if at times lacking the imagination to solve the 'mystery' ... it is in the legal aspects of this saga that Toobin is in his element. His greatest contribution is the publication of previously unseen prison correspondence which sheds light on the evolution of Patty’s personal and political outlook ... Yet Toobin is not particularly engaged with the ideas that animated the revolutionaries.
[Toobin] lays out an excellent case for Hearst as the ultimate opportunist — or a young woman so morally pliant she bent whichever way the wind blew ... American Heiress gives us the characters and discord of the time ... [Toobin's] will be the last word, at least for now.
...while this tale is both well-known and insular (settings include a closet, a safe house and a jail), Toobin effectively positions it within the ’70s milieu, and that’s why it’s worth revisiting, no matter what you think of Hearst’s culpability ... Seeing Hearst as a prism for her era gets harder after her capture. The trial was always going to be less gripping to read about than her life on the run, notwithstanding Toobin’s legal expertise. And so the book’s momentum tapers, but perhaps for good reason: the lesson that Toobin draws from Hearst, about how privilege can affect justice, is, unfortunately, timeless.
In engaging and breezily written prose, [Toobin] shows that it's more than a footnote to its time. In many ways, Hearst's tale embodied its time, or at least the dark side of it ... a terrifically detailed recounting of the Hearst case and its aftermath. But American Heiress is more than that. In telling this story, Toobin also opens a window on the surrealism of the '70s in a way that makes it all of a piece — and, in some instances, a harbinger of the future.
Toobin’s explanation is more sophisticated: Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping was one in a series of situations of which she made the best. She is no more to blame for her SLA actions than for her membership in the ruling class as a Hearst—that is to say, kind of, but not really ... [Toobin] fails to locate the SLA in historical relation to similar groups ... In the long-term, American society traded Patricia Hearst a life outside prison for that version of the story, and for her silence on the rest. With Toobin’s book, the deal still holds.
Toobin skillfully frames all this raw material in the historic context of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s ... Toobin presents vivid, comprehensive renderings of all its personalities, from Hearst’s tormented parents and feckless fiancé, Steven Weed, to the SLA members and FBI investigators and attorneys in her trial, especially the flamboyant and (in Toobin’s view) egomaniacal F. Lee Bailey, who represented Hearst.
Toobin’s craft has somehow reached a new peak in this impressive account of one of the most remarkable crimes in recent history ... the most important part of the book lies in the descriptions of how Hearst interacted with her captors. How could she explain why she would participate in a robbery with a sawed-off shotgun? ... as a firsthand witness, I must say that I agree with Toobin’s assessment; the trial was a train wreck for Hearst, and Bailey was the engineer aboard that train ... There are many reasons to read this book. If you need your fix of the insanity of the 1960s and ’70s, read this book. If you never knew the complete story of the SLA and Patty Hearst, read this book. If you want to understand the complexity and psychology of one of the greatest criminal stories in American history, read this book.
Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN, is well matched to the story, with a keen eye for detail and a powerful narrative style ... Toobin’s book is a fascinating ride through a troubled time, as the more innocent ’60s faded to memory and were replaced by something far darker. American Heiress is a terrific study.
American Heiress contains sharply etched portraits of an extraordinary cast of characters ... Most persuasively, Toobin maintains that before, during and after her time in captivity, Hearst was a rational actor ... All that said, when Toobin reveals that Hearst 'didn’t turn out to be a revolutionary; she turned out to be a mother,' you are still left to wonder what this young woman (who did not cooperate with the writing of this book) really thought about her captors, her parents, capitalism, communism — and herself.
Mr Toobin has amassed a mountain of detail on Tania and the SLA, including files that he purchased from one of Tania’s SLA comrades. He has put them to good use here ... Mr Toobin makes a compelling narrator, and his coverage of the Hearst trial is quite brilliant. He also makes a wounding point: the well-born and well-connected Patty Hearst went to prison, but her sentence was commuted and then she was pardoned. Yet America’s prisons 'teem with convicts who were also led astray and who committed lesser crimes than Patricia.'
Toobin skillfully enlarges and deepens the story I remembered, filling in gaps with material that will be new to many readers ... American Heiress may never quite get us inside Patricia Hearst's head, may not definitively answer the question of whether her conversion was real or a survival tactic. But this book certainly gives us a panoramic picture of her times and a gripping, insightful account of her place in them.
Toobin places Hearst’s decades-old memoir, FBI interviews, and trial testimony at the center of his source material, relying on them so heavily that citations of the memoir alone make up close to a third of his endnotes. This is a strange sort of cherry-picking for a writer of Toobin’s stature ... But how does American Heiress add up for the general-interest reader? It’s certainly entertaining, and brisk. Toobin covers all the bases, and if his writing never quite brings his characters to life, he has an eye for the wacky detail, in which this case abounds ... American Heiress never does transcend the level of anecdote to provide those promised insights into American cultural change.
...a remarkable story, skillfully and engrossingly told. Mr. Toobin turns his critical lens on every player in the cast. Nothing and no one escapes his scrutiny ... Even for those readers who've long since forgotten the Patty Hearst saga, or who grew up long after it ended, this account is well worth the time and attention.
American Heiress is a copiously researched, fascinating chronicle of a two-year slice of American history, an intellectual time capsule full of long-forgotten trinkets and treasures, many of which deserve another look from a distance of 40 years. At the same time, it is a rip-roaringly good read ... Into this uniquely American tapestry, Toobin weaves in skeins of compulsively consumable facts gleaned from scores of documents ... American Heiress is as complete and compelling a snapshot of America in the mid-’70s as a reader is going to find.
