Revolution's End
The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Award-Winner in the “Multicultural Non-Fiction” category of the 2017 International Book Awards
Silver Award winner for True Crime for the Independent Publisher Book Awards
2022 William Randolph Hearst Awardee for Outstanding Service in Professional Journalism from the Hearst Journalism Awards Program
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Forty years after the Patty Hearst “trial of the century,” people still don’t know the true story of the events.
Revolution’s End fully explains the most famous kidnapping in US history, detailing Patty Hearst’s relationship with Donald DeFreeze, known as Cinque, head of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Not only did the heiress have a sexual relationship with DeFreeze while he was imprisoned; she didn’t know he was an informant and a victim of prison behavior modification.
Neither Hearst nor the white radicals who followed DeFreeze realized that he was molded by a CIA officer and allowed to escape, thanks to collusion with the California Department of Corrections. DeFreeze’s secret mission: infiltrate and discredit Bay Area anti-war radicals and the Black Panther Party, the nexus of seventies activism. When the murder of the first black Oakland schools superintendent failed to create an insurrection, DeFreeze was alienated from his controllers and decided to become a revolutionary, since his life was in jeopardy.
Revolution’s End finally elucidates the complex relationship of Hearst and DeFreeze and proves that one of the largest shootouts in US history, which killed six members of the SLA in South Central Los Angeles, ended when the LAPD set fire to the house and incinerated those six radicals on live television, nationwide, as a warning to American leftists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schreiber (Becoming Jimi Hendrix) claims that Donald DeFreeze, the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) the radical organization responsible for the sensational 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst was the creation of both the CIA and the California Department of Corrections, offering conspiracy buffs plenty of red meat, but general readers may find his evidence unconvincing. It is not always evident which sources Schreiber draws on to piece together his theory. He presents Hearst's pre-abduction state of mind about her eventual kidnapper, whom she allegedly visited in prison, without being clear about his basis for doing so. Hearst was not one of the people whom he interviewed for the book, and yet he states that she "suddenly realized that her exciting, secretive, political prisoner love affair was out of control." Elsewhere Schreiber provides thin analysis of sources, accepting uncritically, for example, prisoner Robert Hyde's statement that an officer in the Department of Corrections "ordered" him to recruit inmates to form the SLA. Schreiber credits the SLA with destroying "the credibility of a legitimate progressive movement that protested racism, sexism, the Vietnam War and any form of societal inequality," but the holey research leading up to these claims makes them hard to believe.
