Jeffrey Toobin at the Brattle Theater

Harvard Book Store welcomes New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author JEFFREY TOOBIN and WBUR reporter and writer DAVID BOERI for a discussion of Toobin’s latest book, American Heiress:The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst—the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an 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 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 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.

This event is ticketed.