American Heiress (Signed First Edition, First Printing)

Toobin, Jeffrey

ISBN 10: 0385536712 / ISBN 13: 9780385536714

Published by Doubleday, 2016

About this Item

Signed First Edition, First Printing of this lively history of the kidnapping, radicalization, capture and trial of Patty Hearst -- a saga set in motion by a wordy and violent band of self-styled revolutionaries obscurely named the Symbionese Liberation Army. In 1974, fresh off the senseless assassination of two Oakland school officials, the Bay area-based SLA hatched a sloppy but successful plan to kidnap college student and heiress Patty Hearst in Berkley. Many mindbogglingly bizarre events ensure -- most famously the transformation of Patty into SLA comrade "Tania". Tania participates in two bank robberies and a catastrophically fateful shootout during a bungled shoplifting attempt by a cohort at a sporting goods . Toobin revisits a famous case and a dimly remembered world of extreme radicalism in a story in which no detail is too bizarre or decision too senseless to be true. At one particularly unseemly point a radical ex college athletic director enlists his elderly parents -- yes, his elderly parents -- to drive Patty/Tania, the woman at the top of the FBIs Most Wanted List, from California to Pennsylvania. Signed and dated by Jeffery Toobin on the title page. 371 pages, illustrated. No sign of previous use.

Seller Inventory # 015750

Bibliographic Details

• Title: American Heiress (Signed First Edition, First Printing)
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385536712
• ISBN 13: 9780385536714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

From New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history
 
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”
     The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing “Tania” 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 breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon.  
     The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade.   
     Or did she?

About the Author

JEFFREY TOOBIN is the bestselling author of The Nine, for which he won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, The Oath, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, and The Run of His Life, which was made into the critically acclaimed FX series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the senior legal analyst at CNN.