American Heiress
Jeffrey Toobin
Doubleday
Is there a better true crime story than that of publishing heiress Patty Hearst? In 1974, aged 19, Hearst was kidnapped from her San Francisco home by a ragtag group of revolutionaries calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. Within months she appeared to be a convert to their cause and participant in their crimes.
Jeffrey Toobin is an ex-lawyer, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of a number of bestsellers on legal issues, including one on which the recent award-winning TV series, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, was based.
In his riveting new book, American Heiress, Toobin looks at whether Hearst was a brainwashed innocent or a spoilt little rich-girl-turned-revolutionary. Truth is stranger than fiction in the story of how Hearst evolved from kidnap victim to gun-toting revolutionary and armed robber, which raises complex legal and moral issues about the extent of individual responsibility. It’s a fascinating story, and Toobin tells it in a highly intelligent way, drawing largely on previously unpublished material.
He starts by placing the events in their political and cultural context. The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for the US, with the Vietnam War dragging on and the Watergate scandal escalating. San Francisco had been hit by a series of violent crimes. Add to the mix the fact that the Hearst name was “synonymous with fame, wealth and power”, and it’s easy to see why Hearst’s kidnapping caused a national sensation.
Toobin analyses all this in an attempt to work out whether Hearst was acting voluntarily or, as she claimed, because she thought she’d be killed if she didn’t do as she was told. He describes a number of occasions on which Hearst was left alone, unrestrained, but failed to flee.
Some of Toobin’s analysis doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. He sees no indoctrination in the fact that, in the early days, Hearst was blindfolded and confined to a small closet, during which SLA members read her Marxist and Maoist literature. Really?
And at the end he suggests that Hearst merely “fell in with bad people”, like many wayward teenagers. This ignores the fact that she was kidnapped at gunpoint.
These quibbles aside, American Heiress is a compelling account of one of the great controversies of the last century.
Faithful
Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
The latest book by prolific, bestselling American novelist Alice Hoffman is about loss, guilt, love and survival. The life of Long Island teenager Shelby Richmond is shattered by a car accident in which she’s spared but her best friend, the girl “every boy wanted to date and every girl wanted to be like”, is catastrophically injured.
Wracked with guilt, Shelby shaves her head, self-harms and hides in her parents’ basement. She takes up with her drug dealer and they head to New York, where she gets a job in a pet shop and finds solace in her friendship with a co-worker and her children, Chinese dinners and a motley crew of rescued dogs.
Hoffman writes with tenderness and humour of one damaged soul’s journey back from the brink, exploring in the process the relationships between mother and daughter, pets and owners, friends and lovers. A testimony to the redemptive power of love.
Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook
Clive James
Yale University Press
In this highly entertaining collection of essays, author, critic and memoirist Clive James writes with typical wit and insight about the cultural importance of American box-set TV shows; from The Sopranos and Breaking Bad through to Mad Men, The Wire and Game of Thrones.
Agreeing with the oft-stated idea that we’re living in the golden age of television, James points to the cultural frame of reference that such shows provide.
With its president-from-central-casting, he argues that The West Wing helped pave the way for Barack Obama. James believes the role of classical literature has been usurped, though he can’t resist alluding to Machiavelli, Dante and T.S. Eliot himself.
He emphasises the central importance of good writing, arguing that all the best shows are gripping. On that basis, he says Australia’s Underbelly and Rake should be included. James’s writing is so good you can enjoy this book even if you haven’t seen the shows.
