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<\/a>Most of us who were alive during the Patty Hearst ordeal, I suspect, stopped thinking about her a long time ago. There wasn\u2019t much to like about the heiress to the Hearst Newspapers fortune, not much reason to wonder or care how she\u2019s been doing since getting out of prison in1979.<\/p>\nThen, Jeffrey Toobin came along with American Heiress<\/em>, resurrecting her in our national consciousness with a book that is so well researched, so well constructed and so cleanly written that we\u2019ll devour his 339 pages.<\/p>\n Patricia, as she preferred to be known, gained national attention in 1974 at a time when the San Francisco Bay area roiled with a mixture of street crime, strained race relations and radical politics. Anarchists, socialists, nihilists, you name them, were conducting nearly daily bombings, and one obscure group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, had assassinated a popular African-American schools superintendent just months previous.<\/p>\n Hearst, 19, and her exceptionally bland and self-indulgent fianc\u00e9 were living in a San Francisco apartment when, on the night of Feb. 20, someone knocked. After her fianc\u00e9 opened the door, the two were wrestled to the floor, although the fianc\u00e9 quickly escaped. Hearst was tossed into the trunk of a car and spirited into the national limelight.<\/p>\n It would be 19 months before she was arrested, yes arrested, and charged with bank robbery. Within two months of being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, she had joined their ranks, possibly finding something to be excited about \u2013 a bank robbery and a violent overturning of society — for the first time in her life.<\/p>\n Had it not been for its violent aspects, the Hearst\/SLA story could have been easily developed into a TV sitcom. Something akin to Three\u2019s Company<\/em>: Kidnapped boring rich girl joins an \u201carmy\u201d of eight, most of whom are spoiled middle class pseudo-intellectuals led by a delusional escaped inmate. It\u2019s an army of generals but no soldiers, of grand aspirations and pronouncements but no chance of achieving them. There were times I couldn\u2019t help but laugh, even though I\u2019m sure I wasn\u2019t supposed to.<\/p>\n Toobin\u2019s research is magnificent. He takes us through the SLA\u2019s days on the West Coast, its trip cross country, its trip back west and then through Hearst\u2019s capture and trial.<\/p>\n His telling of the story is even better. The legal writer for The New Yorker <\/em>magazine, Toobin writes so clearly that the reading is effortless. It\u2019s a joy to read an entire book and not find a single clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n A friend recently asked if I came away from the book disliking Hearst. I can\u2019t remember ever really liking her, I should say, and this book did nothing to change my mind. Patty Hearst has always gotten her way in life. She\u2019s stood for nothing other than herself, her character chameleon-like in transforming to the circumstances and what was in her own best interests. She should have been tried as an accomplice to murder. Instead, she served a few months in jail.<\/p>\n And what has come of the boring rich girl, turned \u201ckill the pigs\u201d spouting 1970s radical, turned Stockholm Syndrome victim, turned prison inmate, turned author?<\/p>\n In 2015, her shih tzu won the toy category in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.<\/p>\n