My Search for Patty Hearst, by Weed, Steven with Scott Swanton
Inventory #: 01237
Price: $18.00

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My Search for Patty Hearst, by Weed, Steven with Scott Swanton. Crown Publishers: New York, 1976. Edition: First edition (no additional printings stated). ISBN: 0517525798. Hardcover, 8vo, 343 pages. Quarter bound in black cloth over brown, paper-covered boards; gilt lettering on spine. Illustrated with thirty-two plates (sixteen leaves) of black and white photographs.

Condition: Fine in a Near Fine jacket.

Contents: Publisher's Note:

When 22-year-old Steven Weed met his 17- year-old pupil, Patty Hearst, at fashionable Crystal Springs School for Girls, the only noteworthy exception to the ordinariness of the event was that Patty Hearst was the heiress to one of America's most gaudy fortunes. Their affair, their access to the pleasures of plutocrats, their genuine love, are described as a prelude to the horror of the kidnapping.

Catapulted into headlines by the ruthless curiosity of the media, Weed's bereavement at Patty's loss and his pain and bewilderment at her apparent conversion to the ways of her captors make him search deeper for answers than he has searched ever before. What yearnings were satisfied by the SLA that were not by her titanically rich family? What love did she find that she did not find in her apparently happy love affair with Steven Weed? What was it in the youth culture, and especially the Berkeley subculture, that turned Patricia Hearst into Tania, suicidal devotee of the uncompromising and murderous Symbionese Liberation Army?

In searching £or his lover's body and soul, Steven Weed enlists the aid 0£ every known radical group that might have some influence on the SLA, and in so doing, takes us on an odyssey through a "weirdly inbred Bay Area subculture of ex-cons, escaped cons, white radicals, militant feminists, embittered Vietnam veterans, misfits,and losers, all of whom saw themselves -- see themselves, for it still exists -- as fighting in the 'belly 0£ the fascist beast,' inspired to self-righteous rage by George Jackson's cry, 'People are already dying who could be saved, generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives i£ you fail to act. Discover humanity and your love in revolution. Pass the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people!'

Weed takes us into other worlds and other heads: there is the "Berkeley right-on, more-radical-than-thou, I-can.dig-it mentality"; the Billy Graham-J Edgar Hoover ethos of the FBI; the frustrated bewilderment 0£ the Hearsts, unaccustomed to anything but omnipotence. And, perhaps, most poignantly, there is Steven Weed, struggling to understand what is going on around him, seeking to defend himself from the onslaught of the media, from his own terror and confusion. Steven Weed's search £or identity amid the tragedy 0£ his lover's defection is not the least important part of MY SEARCH FOR PATTY HEARST.