American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin

In February 1974, the 19-year-old publishing heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her San Francisco home by an armed revolutionary group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), said Damian Whitworth in The Times. The SLA’s political aims were pretty vague, but they clearly had a fondness for Karl Marx, and the kidnapped heiress was subjected to a “lot of Marxist readings”. These “seemed to have had an effect” on the teenager, and within two months she had converted to their cause. She spent the next year-and-a-half “on the run”, taking part in the SLA’s armed robberies and other “criminal activities” before being tracked down by the FBI. At Hearst’s trial, the main issue was whether she’d been “brainwashed” or was a willing participant in the SLA’s crimes, said Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times. “The jury quickly found her guilty”, and she was sentenced to seven years in jail (commuted later by President Carter: she was freed after 22 months). Jeffrey Toobin’s book is a fascinating portrait of the 1970s counterculture – “when almost every student, it seemed, wanted to be engaged in revolution”. Sadly, his characters are not very engaging. And that includes its “pragmatic” protagonist, who, on her release, “quickly adapted to being a Hearst again”.

Hearst’s story has been the subject of countless non-fiction books, academic papers and documentaries, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. It has also – “the eyes widen” – inspired two separate porn films. Toobin justifies revisiting it once again by claiming it foreshadowed “the future of the media and celebrity culture”. Yet what his narrative really “drives home” is the saga’s “freakish singularity”. For all its intriguing detail, American Heiress proves “strangely uninvolving… Never has a battier story been told with so straight a face.”