It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army--who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. But the robbery--and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst's criminal conviction--seemed oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era. With Patty's...