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\nFrom New Yorker staff writer
and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: T
he People v. O. J. Simpson\, the definitive account of the kidnapping
and trial that defined an insane era in American history
On Fe
bruary 4\, 1974\, Patty Hearst\, a sophomore in college and heiress to the
Hearst family fortune\, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled re
volutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already s
ensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3\, whe
n the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had
adopted the nom de guerre &ldquo\;Tania.&rdquo\;
The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing&mdash\;the Hearst family trying to secur e Patty&rsquo\;s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Fran cisco for free\; the bank security cameras capturing &ldquo\;Tania&rdquo\; wielding a machine gun during a robbery\; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey\; the largest police shoot-out in American history\; the first bre aking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the co untry\; Patty&rsquo\;s year on the lam\, running from authorities\; and he r circuslike trial\, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal\, after which the term &ldquo\;Stockholm sy ndrome&rdquo\; entered the lexicon.
\nThe saga of Patty Hearst highl ighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervo us breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of pre viously secret documents\, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1\,500 terrorist bomb ings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-ba ked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex\, politics and violence t hat swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. Ameri can Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimag inable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors&rsqu o\; crusade.
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