The Hearsts: Father and Son

Very interesting and enjoyable to listen to.

Fantastic book--especially if you were there or plan to go there.

Good read!!

The Hearst: Father And Son  A much complete and better understanding of Son and Father. I think the son never mastered the difficult and different personalty of his father .It is apparent I believe Mr. Hearst's great and unlimited wealth, for the times made it possible for Mr Hearst to do and accomplish projects only he could grasps.

I agree with previous reviewer on this page, Miranda Ferrell, about too many people picking on William Randolph Hearst Senior and his entire family for almost 100 years until this book was published in 1991.If you lived in the San Francisco Bay Area or Sacramento in 1974 and you were old enough to know what was going on then, you recall hearing talk that the Symbionese Liberation Army gave the entire Hearst family what they deserved. You recall people applauding the event at which laborers hired by the Hearsts gave away free food to people who claimed they were hungry.William Harris, Emily Harris and other members of the SLA told the Hearsts that if they gave away a lot of food, the SLA would release Patty Hearst from captivity. Turned out to be a lie. And the handout of food in front of a huge San Francisco office building was, according to a San Francisco history web site, ". . . a disorganized disaster. Scores of people were injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks as huge crowds of people unexpectedly showed up for the food."I was old enough in 1974 to understand what strangers were saying about Patty Hearst's ordeal. I recall California residents trying to create a direct link between William Senior's having given Marion Davies millions of dollars in cash, clothing, jewelry and his son Randy's deserving the humiliation of throwing boxes of food off moving trucks and his daughter Patty transforming into Tania the revolutionary. But William Senior died more than twenty years before his granddaughter Patty, born after his death, was kidnapped. You are heartless if you say Patty deserved to be kidnapped and raped because of events that had happened before her birth.This book by Bill Hearst, Randy's brother, includes details of how he and his extended family were traumatized by the crimes of William Harris, Emily Harris and other SLA members. It's nice that President Jimmy Carter pardoned Patty and released her from federal prison. Because Carter had the support of millions of bleeding-heart liberals, the pardon made many of them realize how stupid William and Emily Harris were. Emily Harris had been an honor student at Indiana University (Bloomington) in the 1960s. Her husband William had been a decorated lieutenant in the United States Marines. Another "brilliant" SLA member was Emily Montague, who shot and killed an innocent woman during a bank robbery and later justified the killing because her victim was "a bourgeois pig."This scholarly book picks up where President Carter's pardon of Patty left off. Please read it, historians. Remind yourselves that William Randolph Hearst Sr. was a newspaper publisher who owned radio stations and a newsreel company. He influenced what millions of people thought. He wasn't a full-time gigolo. He was right-wing, but so what? He wasn't an extremist. Many left-wing newspaper publishers cheated on their wives, too. Judge them all by what they published and what they wrote.

Very good read.

Good read. Seemed, for the most part, a good perspective of WRH, Sr. given that it was written by WRH, Jr.

"The Hearsts: Father and Son" is a really excellent family biography authored by William Randolph Hearst, Jr., son of the founder of the Hearst publishing empire. The author is himself a gifted and experienced journalist, which gives this work a good deal of verve. I was really fascinated by this family story.This biography is much more than the story of either the family patriarch or his son. It is a sprawling story of American Society and prominent Americans of the times in question. The author was friends with numerous notable Americans both in and out of journalism. The author even tells a story about being "sucker punched" by Ernest Hemingway. Of course he is an uncle of Patricia Hearst, who was the victim of a notorious crime and temporarily, also the victim of subsequent injustice.The author composed this fine work in the early 1990s. As such some of the work is dated in the manner of a "time capsule". He talks about the National Debt being two trillion dollars... Similarly, I found it interesting that the author, when talking about how tough his father was, he compared him to a much younger business man named Donald Trump. Hmmm....Anyway, I combined this fine family story with a biography of William Randolph Hearst Senior by Charles River Editors. I read that work first and am glad that I did. I found the entire experience to be very satisfying and educational. I purchased this fine family biography on audiobook and found it to be a good audiobook to listen to while taking a walk, etc... I very much appreciated the entire reading, listening, and learning experience. Thank You.