In 1974, on his twentieth birthday, sportswriter Jay Weiner was unexpectedly taken to the farmhouse where kidnap-victim-turned-urban-guerilla Patty Hearst was hiding. His decision not to testify about who he met and what he saw eventually sent him to federal prison for four months. This is his story.

Coming this fall from the
University of Minnesota Press

His surprise six hours with Hearst—the heiress-turned-revolutionary—are at the heart of Jay Weiner's coming-of-age memoir. It's a deeply personal, exhaustively reported tale of idealism, mistakes, power, betrayal, consequences, and redemption in 1970s America.

"Jay Weiner's fascinating coming-of-age is a Kafkaesque tale of betrayal, death, the FBI, an NBA superstar, and a 50-year-old lesson on what could happen again. Like now. Reads like a thriller."

From Robert Lipsyte, former New York Times sports columnist and author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamworld and An Accidental Sportswriter.

What People Are Saying

"Jay Weiner has written a coming-of-age story unlike any I have ever read. With the wisdom acquired over a half-century of distance, and with the storytelling skills of a master journalist, he has revisited both the bracing idealism and the dangerous self-delusions of the New Left. Weiner may have been only a bit player in the saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, but even that fleeting proximity endows this book with its drama and its tragedy."—
Samuel G. Freedman, author of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

"Jay Weiner is an award-winning former sports journalist who never abided by the admonition to ‘stick to sports.’ To read his intriguing memoir is to find out why. A More Dangerous Game tells the story of a surprising slice of American history with a compelling cast of characters, famous and infamous. Even though it happened decades ago, it’s a story worth retelling to this day."—
Christine Brennan, USA Today columnist and author of On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports        

"In A More Dangerous Game, Jay Weiner perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the 1970s through his brief, chance encounter with the notorious Patty Hearst. He could have not have prediced the years-long saga that would follow, which ended with a stint in federal prison. Weiner's book reminds us that true life is stranger than fiction."— 
Rachael Hanel, author of Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman's Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army