Hearst becomes part of their political escapades: they demand the Hearst family pay for food for the poor in California, rob banks at gunpoint together, and participate in a police shoot-out that remains the largest in American history.

In her evolving relationship with the SLA, Ms. Hearst is held captive in a closet by the SLA, a disorganized and ragtag counterculture group with an “anarchic intensity” (p 15) and an attraction to “guerilla theater” (p 15) and media attention. Hearst and her family, her tendency toward rebellion, and her concerns about feeling trapped by the life that stretched before her on a “kind of automatic pilot” (p 23). Questions arise early about tensions between Ms.

Ms Hearst was a sophomore at the University of California and had become recently engaged to a teaching fellow at the same university. Hearst, the privileged daughter of Randolph and Catherine Hearst. The Prologue begins with the dramatic kidnapping of Ms. Toobin recounts the kidnapping, crimes, and trial of Patty Hearst, and recreates the struggle for the reader of the central question of her case: was Patty Hearst a willing participant in the crimes she committed, paradoxically liberated from the trappings of her previous life by her abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)? Or, was she coerced into these acts under the threat of death and instead the victim of a phenomenon similar to Stockholm Syndrome? The absence of her direct perspective, however, enables the reader to experience her saga exactly the way the American people, and her jury would, with only a pattern of reported facts and the opportunity for multiple, if conflicting, interpretations to explain them. Hearst declined to participate in the project. Toobin, by extensive use of back stories and inside information, renders her seemingly inexplicable story organic with the times, and brings this era to life. Hearst's transformation was the post-Vietnam War unrest in America, manifesting as pop-up anarchy. Toobin's previous subjects include the Supreme Court and O. Jeffrey Toobin, attorney, staff writer at The New Yorker, and legal commentator on CNN, has taken on the life and times of Patty Hearst, heiress turned urban terrorist in the 1970s.

American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin