Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

by Heather Ann Thompson

In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson reveals how the infamous New York subway shooting of 1984 divided a nation, unveiling the potent cocktail of rage and resentment that ushered in a new era of white vigilante violence.

On December 22, 1984, white New Yorker Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers at point-blank in a New York City subway car. Goetz slipped into the subway tunnels undetected, fleeing the city to evade capture. From the moment Goetz turned himself in, the narrative surrounding the shooting became a matter of extraordinary debate, igniting public outcry and capturing the attention of the nation.

While Goetz's guilt was never in question, media outlets sensationalized the event, redirecting public ire toward the victims themselves. In the end, it would take two grand juries and a civil suit to achieve justice on behalf of the four Black teenagers. For some, Goetz would go on to become a national hero, inciting a disturbing new chapter in American history. This brutal act revealed a white rage and resentment much deeper, larger, and more insidious than the actions of Bernie Goetz himself. Intensified by politicians and tabloid media, it would lead a stunning number of white Americans to celebrate vigilantism as a fully legitimate means for addressing racial fear, fracturing American race relations.

Drawing from never-before-seen and archival interviews, newspaper accounts, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the social and political conditions which set the stage for these events, delving into the lives of Goetz and his four victims—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Crime, True Crime, Race, American History

560 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 2026

About the author

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. She has written on the history of mass incarceration, as well as its current impact, for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarcerations in the United States and has given Congressional briefings on this subject. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve often thought about trying to teach like an online course to help people get into history - Enjoying History from a Non-Professional Perspective (yeah, we can workshop the title) - and Thompson’s work fits perfectly within the style. History can be lively and informative, and this book excels at letting the reader get sucked into a phenomenally well told narrative while never straying far from how to see the past as the precursor to our present. Our lives aren’t disconnected, and this book is a great resource for fighting against the myopic views of our uniqueness. This work provides so much depth to how we can view and consume the world around us as story of who we are.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Fear and Fury” and the Subway as Moral Theater: How One 1984 Shooting Became a Blueprint for America’s Politics of Panic
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | January 27th, 2026


~Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos~

In New York, the subway is a confessional without a priest. It asks you to sit close to strangers and invent a story that explains your proximity. In the 1980s, when the city’s fiscal hangover hardened into a civic mood, those stories began to run on a single fuel: suspicion. Heather Ann Thompson’s “Fear and Fury” takes one of the era’s most overfamiliar flashpoints – Bernhard Goetz’s 1984 shooting of four Black teenagers on a downtown train – and performs the rarest feat in American nonfiction: it makes a myth feel newly dangerous by returning it to the lives it flattened.

Thompson begins by declining the usual center of gravity. Most retellings of the Goetz case start with the gun: the glint of metal in fluorescent light, the jolt of violence that makes a narrative “go.” Thompson starts with what violence interrupts. She introduces Darrell Cabey not as a future headline but as a boy in the South Bronx, shaped by the blunt mathematics of disinvestment and the private heroism of a mother trying to keep a household upright when the city itself seems to tilt. The move is both moral and aesthetic. By restoring the victims’ interiority first, Thompson changes what the reader can tolerate later. When the tabloid machinery begins to grind, you feel the reduction as an additional injury – the second shooting, this one in language.

That language is one of Thompson’s true antagonists. “Fear and Fury” is a book about an event, but it is also a book about the stories that make events usable. In Thompson’s telling, fear is not merely an emotion or an instinct. It is a credential. It grants permission – to preempt, to harm, to be believed. Fury, meanwhile, becomes a civic performance, a proof of seriousness, a substitute for policy. The case matters not only because bullets flew, but because the city watched those bullets and decided what they meant. Thompson is after the interpretive moment: the instant when a violence becomes a parable and a parable becomes governance.


~Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos~

Her South Bronx chapters are unsparing without being fetishistic. Thompson does not ask the reader to admire “grit” as a retro aesthetic; she asks the reader to understand what grit costs. Public housing appears not as a colorful backdrop but as an engineered environment: buildings allowed to decay, systems that fail at the exact frequency required to drain a family’s bandwidth, stairwells and lots that teach the body a permanent vigilance. Thompson has the historian’s gift for making conditions feel intentional. The borough’s suffering is not weather. It is policy, maintenance choices, budget lines, and a broader cultural willingness to treat certain neighborhoods as expendable.

Yet Thompson refuses the other temptation: turning the South Bronx into a saintly community of pure victims. She acknowledges the violence residents endured from multiple directions – street crime, the drug trade, the everyday risks of a city that had stopped caring about some of its own arteries. Cabey is not presented as spotless, because spotless is another form of stereotype. The book’s point is subtler and more bracing: you do not need perfect victims to have an unjust world. You only need a world that confuses disadvantage with deviance and then calls its confusion “realism.”

Goetz, too, is rendered with a steady refusal of caricature. Thompson does not make him a monster imported from a different moral universe. She makes him a man who found, in the city’s ambient panic, a private ideology that felt like survival. He moves through Manhattan as if the public has failed him, nursing the sense that he is perpetually owed protection and perpetually denied it. Thompson shows how fear can be practiced: rehearsed in the mind, narrated as identity, hardened into a worldview. The book is careful not to conflate explanation with excuse. Goetz is understandable without being exonerated – a distinction American culture often struggles to maintain, especially when the figure at the center is white, male, and willing to brandish grievance as virtue.

If the book stopped there, it would still be valuable: a restorative narrative that returns complexity to the characters most history has treated as props. But Thompson’s ambition is larger, and it is what makes “Fear and Fury” feel like a companion piece to her earlier “Blood in the Water,” another work that treats a single violent episode as a prism through which a broader system can be seen. Thompson understands institutions the way good novelists understand families: as bodies with habits, grudges, and incentives. Police departments, courts, city agencies, newsrooms, and political machines appear not as abstractions but as cultures that reward certain behaviors and punish others.


~Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos~

This is where the book’s title becomes diagnostic. Thompson traces how fear and fury were amplified in the 1980s, then monetized. Crime coverage becomes an industry, and an industry needs product: simple villains, repeatable story arcs, villains who look the same each night. Thompson shows how animalizing metaphors about Black youth – the rhetoric of packs and predators – did not merely describe a perceived threat but manufactured a social permission structure. The city’s panic became a commodity, and once commodified it began to demand constant replenishment. The result is a feedback loop: fear generates stories, stories justify policing, policing produces new images of threat, threat generates more fear.

The shooting itself is written with a restraint that feels like a moral choice. Thompson knows the seductions of violence on the page. She keeps the scene close enough to feel its suddenness, but she refuses to choreograph it into entertainment. The aftermath, meanwhile, becomes a study in narrative violence: how quickly the victims are put on trial in the court of public imagination, how swiftly nuance is treated as betrayal. Goetz becomes a symbol – the “vigilante” figure the city’s tabloids can sell, the folk hero for those who want the reassurance that someone is finally doing what “the system” refuses to do.

Here Thompson’s cultural intelligence is sharpest. She understands that the Goetz story took hold because it fit a prewritten script: the righteous citizen, the urban savages, the helpless bureaucrats. It was a script Americans already knew from movies like “Death Wish,” from the moral grime and lonely masculinity of “Taxi Driver,” from the broader genre in which the city is a jungle and the white man’s fear is treated as anthropology. Thompson does not overstate the point. She simply shows how easily that aesthetic becomes politics. A fantasy of individual punishment becomes a substitute for structural repair.

The courtroom chapters reveal how law can function as an amplifier rather than a corrective. Thompson is attentive to the way legal language – “reasonable,” “necessary,” “imminent” – depends on shared cultural assumptions about whose fear is credible. The law promises neutrality, but neutrality is only as fair as the social imagination that feeds it. Thompson’s account makes the reader feel how “reasonableness” operates as a kind of racial Rorschach test. What would a “reasonable person” perceive in a subway car? What does threat look like? Who is allowed to claim panic as proof? These are not merely legal questions. They are questions about citizenship.


~Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos~

Throughout, Thompson keeps returning to the human cost of being turned into an emblem. Darrell Cabey’s paralysis is not treated as a narrative consequence that “raises the stakes.” It is treated as a life – a daily reality that persists after the headlines move on. The book refuses to let the case end where public attention ends. Thompson follows the long afterlife: civil litigation, political transformations, reputational rewrites, the slow institutional digestion of outrage. The reader begins to understand that one of the most insidious forms of power is the ability to outlast other people’s grief.

This refusal of catharsis is one of the book’s most rigorous qualities. Many works of contemporary nonfiction depend on a moral arc that provides release: revelation, condemnation, a gesture toward reform. Thompson is skeptical of that structure, and her skepticism feels earned. She does not offer redemption because redemption would be a lie the system tells itself. The city’s story about Goetz did not resolve with a neat moral consensus; it continued as precedent, as rhetoric, as policy. Thompson’s writing, disciplined and sometimes relentless, mirrors that continuation. The reader may occasionally wish for more silence, more trust that the evidence has already done its work. But the book’s insistence feels like a strategy against a culture that has insisted, for decades, in the opposite direction.

If “Fear and Fury” has a weakness, it is the one that often accompanies moral and archival ambition: a tendency, in places, to press hard on points the narrative has already made with devastating clarity. Thompson wants every wire visible in the circuit. She is determined that the reader not escape into nostalgia or the comforting belief that the past was simply rougher, crazier, less enlightened. At times, that determination can heat the prose. Yet the cumulative effect remains powerful: Thompson’s insistence feels like a rebuttal to the way American culture treats violence as episodic rather than systemic, as isolated rather than infrastructural.

The book’s relevance to the present does not depend on cheap parallels, and Thompson is too serious a historian to play that game. Still, it is impossible to read “Fear and Fury” without feeling the tremor of now. We live in a moment when public safety rhetoric again thrives on compression, when the idea of “reasonable fear” continues to operate as a moral solvent, dissolving accountability with a single phrase. We live amid a media ecosystem that can turn resentment into content and content into power, amid renewed debates about vigilantism, self-defense claims, and the policing of “disorder.” Thompson does not say history repeats. She shows how history trains reflexes, how certain narratives become so familiar they pass for instinct.


~Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos~

In that sense, “Fear and Fury” belongs in the lineage of books that treat punishment as a political project rather than a natural response. It pairs fruitfully with “Locking Up Our Own,” which complicates the comforting story that only one side built the carceral state; with Elizabeth Hinton’s “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” which traces how social policy mutated into policing; with “The Condemnation of Blackness,” which reveals how crime statistics became racial ideology; with “Ghettoside,” which interrogates the uneven distribution of protection; and, in its city-making scope, with “The Power Broker,” another work that shows how governance remakes daily life while insisting its choices are merely pragmatic. Thompson’s distinctive contribution is her blend of intimate restoration and systemic indictment. She makes the victims human first, then shows how the system profits from making them less than that.

Ultimately, Thompson’s great subject is permission: permission to assume, permission to preempt, permission to punish, permission to confuse fury with virtue. She shows how that permission is conferred not only by laws but by headlines, by political theater, by the steady repetition of stories that teach a public whom to fear and whom to forgive. “Fear and Fury” is not simply a history of an infamous subway shooting. It is a moral history of a civic habit: the habit of treating certain lives as threats before they act, and treating certain fears as wisdom without question.

As both history and literature – for its narrative propulsion, its archival rigor, its refusal to aestheticize harm, and its bracing clarity about how stories become policy – I would rate “Fear and Fury” a 91 out of 100.

[sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

may this man have a painful trip down to hell.

(also fuck reagan)

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was 17 years old and living in Canada when Bernhard Goetz shot 4 black teenagers on a NYC subway car. I remember the case, but it turns out that, like so many, what I remember is largely misinformation. This excellent account not only walks the reader through the event itself and the subsequent trials, but also puts all of this into the sociopolitical context of 1980s NYC.

The racism wrapped up in this case is astounding and probably shouldn’t be surprising, and yet I was surprised nonetheless. The author also explores how this instance of so-called vigilante justice has reverberated since (Stand Your Ground laws being just one example). An informative, illuminating read that I found quite discouraging in our current moment.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for allowing me to read an ARC of this title.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had heard of the Bernard Goetz shootings prior to reading this book, but this was before my time. I had different accounts regarding this case. Heather Ann Thompson shows what happened. She provides biographical information on those involved, what happened prior to the shooting, during the shooting, and the aftermath. One of the positives of this book is I learned new information regarding this case. I did not know, for example, that the four men Goetz shot and their families received vile and hateful messages that contained racial slurs, insults and saying they deserved to be shot. I also did not know the media rushed the story and did not have the facts straight.

The problem I had with this book was it dragged at times. I was looking forward to reading this book, but I found myself skimming. There were interesting pieces of information here and there, but I did not love the book. It was an average read in my opinion.

[Nicole Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not much has changed in 40 years. Excellent writing and research

[PATCHES]

in heather ann thompson we trust

[Derrick Contreras · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a thorough and in depth look at the Bernie Goetz case. Truly will make you go crazy as everything unfolds. Heather Ann Thompson is an expert at keeping you on the edge of your toes with suspense. The final section was not needed and really was a let down to an otherwise solid 5 star book. 4.5 stars because of the ending

[Alyssa Russek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was definitely one of the hardest books I have ever read.

Nobody lives in a perfect place untouched by crime, but reading just how drastic it can be is absolutely heart breaking.

I want to start by saying this book doesn't feel like some "white savior" kind of flavorless nonfiction. Thompson writes incredibly well and storylike. Honestly her writing style kept me going at times when I felt the was too heavy.

The subject is incredibly heavy. Thompson gives background to each of the main players. Yes, the boys weren't fully innocent within their lives. In the moment of the crime though, Thompson lays out, they were simply kids trying to survive. Meanwhile Goetz may have had a difficult childhood but it doesn't give him a pass for his actions.

The writing was great. At times though I felt as if I was listening to the same things twice. Thompson laid out the background, then during the court case rehashed it all again. I understand the reasoning for this but at times it felt like, I know this already. What happened was so incredibly violent, having to reread the graphic report of it multiple times didn't really stun me but disgusted me.

There are some things I was surprised Thompson didn't bring up, like how jury pool in Manhattan would also include Westchester, an even more conservative area that isn't even part of the city.
I also wanted to know whay Goetz's family said on his crimes and how they reacted.

Unfortunately I feel that the people who need most to understand the issues laid out in the book either won't read the book or will read parts and say that it's unjustly one sided. I feel as if my politics align with this book so there was no need to deeply persuade me to change my opinions. I am not sure though the book would persuade someone who goes into it with differing opinions though.

I knew going into it the book would mainly focus on the Goetz trial and his crimes but was hoping that she would further go into the ripple effects created. The final section briefly touched what I thought would be a multi chapter section. Most likely the case for this was just not enough space.

Ultimately this is a good book, just not one I personally enjoyed. Reading about the atrocities where I live was hard. I know many of these locations and have been to them myself.

I would certainly read another Thompson book without a question, I just may not read this one again.

[Ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is undeniably a must read, especially for people of my generation and after who have likely never heard of this incident. We cannot witness and successfully push back against what is happening today without a deep understanding of the history that laid the groundwork for it, and this book lays out a huge piece of that history. As difficult and disheartening it can be to read at points, it’s incredibly important to know the stories of Troy Canty, Barry Allen, James Ramseur, and Darrell Cabey.

A quote I think highlights the importance of this read: “Bernie Goetz’s decision to take his fury out on the most vulnerable people he encountered had been fueled and vindicated by a racial rage that would continue to percolate. This is what would make it possible for men like George Zimmerman to walk free so easily after killing boys like Trayvon Martin. It is what would allow Kyle Rittenhouse to evade prison and become a folk hero. It would also make Trump’s ascendancy to the White House possible and ensure that his supporters could do anything they wanted to do to keep him in power. And it would guarantee that Daniel Penny did not serve a day in prison for killing Jordan Neely.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Shirley Cabey, Darrell’s mother, and her own mother when they said “what verdict he don’t get down here, he will get when he meet his master upstairs.”

Hell is hot.

[Amy Kett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thompson is right up there with my literary boyfriend and one true love Patrick Radden Keefe for narrative non-fiction. This book is not easy. It made me very angry like...99% of the time reading it. I am not sure how I managed to be an 80s baby and know nothing about Bernie Goetz besides the name being familiar (white privilege, anyone?) but the more I read the more I was horrified that this was the first time I was hearing the story. Thompson's contextualization skills are through the roof, and this book sucked me in from page 1. The direct line she draws from Goetz's NYC to Trump's reelection is both enlightening and obvious, gross and somehow oddly comforting that the pieces at least fit together in an understandable (though absolutely infuriating) way. Deepening understanding of the machine is a tool and a weapon, and I'm here for Thompson doing the incredibly hard work of parsing the clusterfuck for us. Read it.

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars.
A must read.
I had tears in my eyes during many parts of this book. The racism that was accepted and still accepted today is appalling.
Bernie Goetz is a disgusting monster of a human as is Donald Trump.
I’m full of rage and once again want to scream in the streets.

[Steven Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1968 I was eighteen years old and had been driving for a few months. My mother asked me to take her to visit a friend and when we returned driving north on Ocean Parkway (Brooklyn, NY) in my father’s brand new Oldsmobile Cutlass a pink Grand Prix pulled next to us and ripped an American flag off the radio antenna which my father proudly displayed. We drove about 50 miles per hour, and a hand reached out from the Grand Prix and tried to pull my mother’s arm through the passenger window which was open. By this time, we were going 70 miles per hour, and I jerked the steering wheel into oncoming traffic to get away from our attackers. Four black men in the car laughed their asses off and pulled away. My immediate reaction was to chase after them, but my mother yelled not too as she wrote down their license plate. We drove to the nearest police precinct and were told by a detective to forget the incident ever happened as the police could do nothing even if they caught the men, a judge would not pursue any charges. I was incensed and drove to my girlfriend’s house and went into the courtyard of the school yard across the street and yelled epithets I am now ashamed of. I relate this story as I read Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winning author Heather Ann Thompson’s latest book. FEAR AND FURY: THE REAGAN EIGHTIES, THE BERNIE GOETZ SHOOTINGS, AND THE REBIRTH OF WHITE RAGE as it raises the question of what is the proper response when you consider yourself in danger.
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In today’s world where there are more guns than people, hidden carry laws, laws that seem to justify shooting someone for the slightest offense, and government agents shooting American citizens, it appears that shooting someone who compromises your safety is accepted by large elements of society. We have witnessed a number of examples over the years when people have shot others and got away with it. For example, the 2012 case of Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Florida, shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. Zimmerman claimed self-defense and was initially not arrested by local police. After significant national outcry, he was arrested and tried for second-degree murder. He was ultimately acquitted by a jury in 2013, a verdict that brought intense scrutiny to Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. Another example occurred in 2004 when Rodney Cox was shot and killed by a Florida homeowner later identified as a FEMA worker, who entered his FEMA trailer after a hurricane. The homeowner fired a warning shot and then shot the man after being placed in a "bear hug". Prosecutors decided the homeowner was acting in self-defense, and he was not prosecuted. This case was a catalyst for the passage of Florida's first "Stand Your Ground" law in 2005, which provides immunity from prosecution if an individual reasonably believes the use of force is necessary. Recently, we had the 2023 shooting of Ralph Yarl as Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white homeowner in Kansas City, shot Yarl, a16-year-old black teenager in the head and then a second time after Yarl mistakenly knocked on his door to pick up his brothers. Lester was initially released without charges, sparking public protests. He was later charged with two counts of first-degree assault and armed criminal action, but the initial lack of charges was widely criticized by organizations like the “Equal Justice Initiative.” Perhaps the most famous example is the 1984 shooting involving Bernard Goetz, a white man in New York City who shot four young Black men on a subway after they approached him and one asked for five dollars. Goetz argued he feared for his safety. He was later acquitted of the most serious charges, including attempted murder, though he was convicted of unlawful weapons possession. The case became a national flashpoint for discussions about race, crime, and self-defense. I could list many more incidents, and it remains an issue today.

For Thompson, the Goetz case is emblematic of the white rage that was simmering in America for decades as media mogul Rupert Murdoch exacerbated the fear and anger of Americans as his newspaper the New York Post reported on the personalities involved as overnight Goetz’s young victims would be characterized as villains, the trial which eventually took place, and Goetz’s acquittal. The book follows the reverberations of the subway shooting and their decades long impact on American society while skillfully recovering the lives of the real victims who many decided that their lives really did not matter.

One of the monograph’s many strengths is the background information that Thompson provides. The author meticulously explains her views based on superb research that includes interviews with many of the participants. She immediately sets the stage for the events that took place on December 22, 1984, by visiting the plight of New York during the 1970s and early 80s. By 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigning for the presidency visited the south Bronx stating, “he hadn’t seen anything like this since London after the blitz.” Since the late 1970s New York had sunk to new lows as newspaper headlines blared that “President Ford Tells New York to Drop Dead” as Washington refused to offer assistance for its budget and debt crisis. Thompson points out that weakening of the American economy throughout the seventies led to less federal funding resulting in services being cut, free college tuition withdrawn, city employees across the bureaucracy fired, and an increase in landlords engaging in arson to collect insurance money for their buildings which they refused to maintain.
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Once Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency he set out to undo as many New Deal socio-economic policies as possible. The Berhard Goetz saga must be seen in the context of the time period in which it took place. By the early 1980s Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Movement, and the liberal-progressive legislation of the 1960s was beginning to stoke the anger of working class whites in America. This anger would push many whites to leave the Democratic Party and turn their support to Ronald Reagan whose genius was his ability “to appeal to white self-interest and to exploit racial rage to greater success, convincing some of the most diehard Democratic Party voters that this was in their best interest also.” The result was the “trickle-down theory” of economics resulting in devastating consequences for minorities living in the south Bronx and other poverty stricken areas of the city. This approach to the federal budget – cutting social spending programs disproportionally hit poor urban families of which the four boys that Goetz targeted were members. The spending cuts fueled Reagan’s tax policies allowing the rate for the wealthy at certain levels +to decline from 70% to 28%.

Thompson continues her excellent analysis by explaining that the lack of jobs, declining educational opportunities, and fewer public places to experience enrichment led to underprivileged teenagers hanging out on street corners, gaining easy money from selling drugs to the point that the south Bronx became known as “crack town.” Further exacerbating the situation was the HIV epidemic which was partly fostered by drug addicts exchanging infected needles. This was occurring at a time when health care resources were increasingly unavailable. Soon gang violence would result as the Reagan administration refused to confront the growing AIDS crisis.

Interestingly the 1980s became the center of what Michael Douglas stated in the film “Wall Street,” “that greed was good” enhancing the reputation and lifestyle of white New Yorkers like Donald Trump and his father. The watershed moment for New York also revolved around Rupert Murdoch’s 1976 purchase of the liberal New York Post and turning it into a tabloid that pandered to a disgruntled white audience employing the sensationalist tactics that were successful in Australia and England. With right wing columnists like Patrick Buchanan arguing that the election of Ronald Reagan was a necessity for white voters who feared the rising black crime rate, and that unlawful behavior was endemic to certain neighborhoods.

With this background Thompson creates the ingredients that led to Goetz’s behavior. The author explains the family backgrounds of Goetz and his victims, their belief systems, and the impact of society. For the four boys who were shot, the life and lack of opportunity led them on the path they chose as did Goetz’s anger at what he perceived to be the cause of crime, disease, street beggars, drug dealers, rotting garbage on the streets, and homelessness. After being a mugging victim on January 26, 1981, on Canal Street in lower Manhattan, Goetz decided to travel to Florida to purchase guns, since he could not obtain a license in New York. The more Goetz witnessed his Greenwich Village neighborhood declining his anger was compounded.

Once Thompson provides the reader with the socio-economic climate Goetz resents, she carefully takes the reader through the events on the New York City subway system of December 22, 1984. After providing the details of the shootings she emphatically states that Goetz had no right to shoot Darrell Cabey, James Ramsuel, Barry Allan, and Troy Canty as many of the witnesses in the subway car attested to.

Thompson excels at describing the legal strategies employed by the prosecution and Goetz’s defense as well as the actual trial. As he approached his day in court Goetz came to believe that he represented something very important and that the “public wasn’t going to take it anymore.” He hired Barry Slotnick as his lead attorney, and it would turn out to be an excellent choice. Slotkin had defended well known clients like Meir Kahane, John Gotti, and Manuel Noriega and his brash, uncompromising, and at times nasty approach to defending his clients were part of the reason for his success. As was evident in his defense of Goetz he would think outside of the box and badger witnesses and the judge until he was satisfied with how the case proceeded. The prosecution was led by Greg Waples, an excellent litigator, but more conventional than the opposition.

After a series of legal machinations and dubious claims by lawyers the trial would begin on December 12, 1986. Thompson presents the give and take between witnesses, lawyers, and prosecutors allowing the reader to witness a pseudo boxing match with verbal punches and counter-punches thrown on a daily basis. The author provides many insights pointing out how effective or ineffective the prosecutor and defense carried on. Slotkin in particular was very efficient in confronting one of the victims, James Ramseur, as he took him apart with a series of pointed questions, overwhelming him on a personal level, badgering him in such a manner that he became so angry he refused to cooperate with the court proceedings. Slotnick’s strategy of bullying witnesses was a gamble which in the end paid off. Perhaps Slotnick’s most brilliant move was to get the judge to allow a recreation of the crime scene in court with “large” black Guardian Angels to replicate the four victims, and gaining permission to bring the jury to a subway car at the site of the shootings which would become the key to the final outcome of the trial.

Thompson does a marvelous job dissecting the nuances of the prosecution and defense and correctly concludes that the jurors fundamentally related more to Goetz than they did to the four young men who were shot based on juror statements after the trial. Thompson’s use of juror statements explaining why they acquitted Goetz on the most serious charges is insightful. For the jury at times, it was difficult to ascertain who was on trial for Goetz or his shooting victims. The key to the views of a number of juror’s opinions was Slotnick’s ability to convince them that Darrell Cabey was not shot while seated, but standing in front of Goetz. A number of jurors believed that Goetz’s 1981 mugging was directly impactful as to how he acted on the day of the subway encounter and saw him as a “frightened man.” As to his admission of guilt to the Concord, NH police detectives they rationalized that Goetz was on the run for nine days and was “exhausted and distraught” so his statement could not be accepted as totally rational. Judge Crane’s instructions played a major role in the fact that the jury had to decide if Goetz saw himself as being in mortal danger and whether it was reasonable for him to believe he was. In addition, Slotnick did a better job than Waples. Lastly, Thompson correctly concludes that “in the 1980s climate in New York a gun-wielding loner like Goetz was more sympathetic to these jurors….than four unemployed Black teenage dropouts trying to survive and somehow thrive in the same city and country.”

The author follows up her effective coverage of the trial and appeals applying the same judicious process in presenting the civil litigation period that followed over the succeeding ten years as the Cabey family tried to gain restitution for what happened to Darrell, and Goetz’s strategy to defend himself. It is clear that the period highlighted the emergence of a new era of racialized rage and the role the Goetz trial played in its enhancement. The rape of a white woman in Central Park by five black teenagers would bring about their conviction (which was overturned years later) and labeled them as the Central Park Five, as well as the murder of Yusef Hawkins by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn are all emblematic of the period. New York City would turn to Rudy Guliani as mayor in 1993 and along with federal legislation implemented by Bill Clinton, New York cracked down on petty crimes, expanded prison sentences, implemented harsher sentencing all of which can be related to the Goetz trial.

Thompson’s new historical study offers portraits of many characters from the period including Goetz and his victims, Barry Slotnick, William Kuntsler, Rudy Guliani, Curtis Sliwa, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and a host of others. She explores how the Reagan Revolution overturned New Deal and Great Society legislation leading to the “greed is good” motto of the 1980s, the conservative approach to crime of the 1990s, and the significant impact of Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post in addition to the creation of the Fox New Network that today still reinforces the racial and economic views of a significant portion of white America and of course the Trump administration. If there is one aspect of Thompson’s presentation that is not quite supported by the past is that white rage was not endemic to the period of the Goetz trial. It exacerbated a condition that has always existed in American history whether the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the racial movements dealing with immigration after W.W.I, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the violence it produced, to an administration that panders to white racial rage as witnessed by its “anti-brown and black” immigration and overall economic policies. Overall, Thompson’s meticulous work should be commended as she presents a painful historical theme that she dramatically demonstrates. A theme we are living through today as the news reports on racial crimes and economic inequality each and every day.

[Dawn Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who lived during this time [I was in high school when the shooting happened ] and remembers the shooting and its aftermath [I lived in NY when the civil trial happened, and it was in the news all the time, and the paper I was reading definitely looked at the whole story differently than the mainstream media and that was refreshing ], this filled in MANY of the holess of the story that the mainstream media either missed *OR* refused to air/write about [I had a teacher {that I am forever grateful for} that made us research this shooting, looking for the views that opposed the MSM, and because of this, I never thought that Goetz was the benevolent vigilante out to "save" the world, and was indeed VERY guilty ] and helped me understand this whole time-frame better [I learned stuff about Guliani, who I had always thought had been rather good for NYC when he was Mayor; boy was I wrong - he DID do good things, but the bad will always outweigh that ], and I believe that it will 100% do that for you too.

Well-written and deeply researched, this book covers a lot of time and characters [and should be absorbed slowly, especially if you have no previous knowledge of the events that happen in this book ], but it is a much needed, important read that will really stay with you and make you question everything you've ever believed and just what is truth, what is lies, and what the media really tells us.

Absolutely brilliant. This is a much read book for everyone.

Thank you to NetGalley, Heather Ann Thompson, and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor/Pantheon for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Ben Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm!!! This delivers very well in terms of digesting and portraying the Goetz shootings, the ensuing trials, and their aftermath.

What it does less well is tie into its title promise of the Reagan 80s and the “Rebirth of White Rage.” Aside from some establishing context and facts early on in chapters, the bulk of the book is concerned with the Goetz part, which again it does well and is informative.

Then for the last 50 pages we get a rapid-fire stroll through the last 30 years of American politics. After the incredibly detailed saga of the trials (truly we hear about EVERY prosecution and defense witness in EVERY trial), this seems trite and tied on, a thesis in search of a story. The connection to the Jordan Neely/Daniel Penny case is the most potent, but gets about three pages in this late-book sprint. Maybe it’s in the editing? Did we need interludes to discuss what was happening with politics/the zeitgeist rather than saving it all for the end? Does this book suffer from Thompson not (as far as I can tell) interviewing Goetz himself?

I suspect my disconnect is from Thompson’s explicit desire in this book to try to explain Trump 2.0. Further, I suspect there is a fallacy in the title, or Thompson’s goal, itself.

White rage did not experience a “rebirth” in this country from Bernie “I’m a huge squirrel-feeding-weed-selling-avowed-racist loser” Goetz — it’s always been simmering below the surface, in search of an outlet.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really heartbreaking book that clearly demonstrates how 40+ years of largely Republican policies have so severely damaged our country. It's also the context for an in-depth narrative about Bernhard Goetz, who tried to murder four black teenagers in 1984 and, instead of going to prison for decades, became a folk hero to many and in some ways the personification of "white rage," the illogical blaming of society's ills on the victims, rather than the villains. The politicians who oversaw the terrible transfer of so much wealth in this country from the lower and middle classes to the 1% have destroyed so much of the New Deal social safety net that allowed this country to boom in the postwar era. Mostly Republicans, but Bill Clinton did his share of damage as well.

[Stephloca · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, thank you to Pantheon and NetGally for the ARC of such an enlightening book. I had never heard of this shooting prior to reading the blurb about this book. This book is meticulously researched regarding the shooting, the perpetrator, its victims and the subsequent trials. But I was particulary impressed by the intersectionality of the author's explanations. There is ample commentary of how systemic injustice and poor economic agendas, like trickle down economics, contributed to the shooting and the social climate. The author also did a great job explaining how conservative media and its growth, fueled by Rupert Murdoch, created both the political and social climate around the time of the shooting and the climate today. I especially appreciated how the author traces the connection between white rage in the 80s and Donald Trumps's current presidency and policies. My only critique is that the title should not refer to the "Rebirth" of white rage, because reading this book begs the question- when did white rage ever die?

[Mackenzie Rodgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5.

Compulsively readable narrative that is heartbreaking and infuriating the entire way through. Thompson gives you no breaks, no reprieve, and no silver linings. For any person wondering, “how tf did we get here?”, this book has a big piece of the puzzle. I’m so glad I read this, despite it being very difficult (mentally & emotionally) to get through. May we all have the courage, the endurance, and the heart to still hope for and build a better world.

As hopeless as most of this book feels, it left me feeling invigorated to stay involved in my local community, and to do more.

[Roe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. I remember all of these events and reading about them now, so many years later, makes me wonder how people ever could have thought that way. And then I’m reminded they still do. This book clearly helps outline how the economic gaps in our society were blown wide and far by Regan and we’re still paying the price. Deeply moving.

[Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't familiar with this story before reading this book and I found it completely engrossing and enraging. I don't think she stuck the landing but still would definitely recommend

[Hassan Rasheed · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author does an excellent job of providing a summary of the NY subway shootings of four black teenagers and successfully debunks the idea that Goetz was acting out of fear. She also provides important context to the shooting. My complaint is this book is repetitive sometimes repeating the same arguments three or four times. It just could have been shorter. Still a good read.

[Shelbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating suggests otherwise, but this is genuinely a fantastic book. It’s very well researched and presents the facts as is. I actually knew absolutely nothing about this event, so everything was new information regarding the shooting. Audiobook was enjoyable.

Three stars for me just because this DRAGGED. I feel like we had the full story by the 1/3 mark, then it got deep into trials, court documents, and the usual US justice system of chasing its tail when it comes to white on black crime. This was a frustrating read just based on the fact very little has changed since Reagan. Again, it’s a great read, I just knew how most of this would sadly unfold (no actual Justice, hate towards the victims, oligarchies ruining the economy and setting people up for failure) so found myself skimming most of the second half. If you like the nitty gritty of trials this might be more your cup of tea.

[Ethan Wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is more than a little ironic for Michael Washburn, in his March 7th, 2026 National Review article The Vilification of Bernie Goetz, Redux, to quote Christopher Hitchen's correct assessment that the mechanical application of ready-made narratives to understand the world demonstrates "not that people learn from history but that they resolutely decline to do so, and instead plunder it for facile images.” It’s ironic because Washburn wields Hitchens as a cudgel with which to pummel Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage for claims it does not make even as Washburn ignores the claims it does. It is simply inaccurate, for example, to write that Thompson "blames the Reagan administration’s pivot away from lavish public spending and emphasis on individual responsibility for fostering a climate in which Darrell Cabey, the black teen paralyzed by two bullets from Goetz’s Smith & Wesson, could not really be blamed for taking part in an attempted mugging," and thus that her book is just one more "rote, predictable rehashing of arguments about “root causes” and systemic injustice that have literally been around for decades." Thompson does nothing of the sort: unless I missed it, the phrase "root causes" never appears in her book, and she in no way excuses Cabey's actions, if only for the simple reason that, to her eyes, there is nothing to excuse: Cabey, after all, was not participating, any more than the other three victims, in an attempted mugging in the first place. On this point at least, her source is pretty unassailable, especially for supporters of Bernie Goetz such as Washburn, since it is none other than Bernie Goetz himself, and his repeated, public and, in some cases, sworn statements that the four boys he shot were not in fact threatening him in any way, and consequently could not be said to have been participating in an “attempted mugging.” Washburn, like so many other supporters of Goetz, sees a mugging that Goetz himself never claimed took place. While I am no expert on history, I have to think that, whatever history might be, it has something to do with actual events as opposed to imagined ones.

So much, then, for Washburn’s respect for history.

To be fair to Washburn, it is not easy to criticize a book that one hasn’t bothered to read. But even if one has bothered to read it, Fear and Fury is a difficult book to criticize, if only because of how admirable and necessary it is - perhaps especially today, as Thompson underscores again and again through her references to the rise of white nationalism and Donald Trump. And yet, the very fact that Thompson can trace such a direct line between “today” and events that took place more than forty years ago suggests that my “especially today” might be more problematic than Thompson would be in a position to realize. What to make of the fact that her book might have been written at many different moments along the trajectory she follows - a trajectory that is more or less arbitrarily limited to the Goetz shooting in 1984 and the return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025? The systematic discrimination, the privileging of the wealthy not just over the poor, but at their expense, and the corresponding demonization of the latter that Thompson shines a light on are, after all, familiar aspects of a very old story, even if how these aspects have been articulated with each other determines the dominant genre of this story in it retelling at any particular moment. The emergence, or rather, re-emergence, of a right wing press in the 80s, and of Fox News in the 90s, no doubt helped shape “fear and fury” into the “white rage” fueling an increasingly fine-tuned Republican political machine, but it didn’t generate that fear and fury in the first place - a fear and fury whose object is, rigorously speaking, as difficult to identify as is its subject. “In America,” writes James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son,

… each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet (“The Harlem Ghetto,” p.73)

What Baldwin calls “furious, bewildered rage” and Thomspon “fear and fury” is born not of the differences in the color of our skins or where our ancestors hailed from, or our relative wealths, or even what gods we worship; it is born, rather, of a certain groundlessness, the excess of the promise over its realization - an excess that spares no one, regardless of race, tax bracket, or religion. And a rigorous attempt to understand how this bewildered rage becomes “white rage,” how it is shaped, formed and given color (or, rather, the absence of color) would have to go well beyond the limits of Thompson’s book. For one thing, such an attempt would find it more difficult to discover in figures such as Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump much explanatory power. As Murdoch himself noted in a passage Thompson refers to, the only color he sees is green - which, if true, suggests that rather than shaping the bewildered rage in some kind of self-conscious fashion, he at once exemplifies and channels it without necessarily having any clear purpose in sight. Does his control of the New York print media in the 80s matter? Of course. Does his control of Fox News matter? Even more so. But does the figure of Rupert Murdoch cast much light on what is actually happening? Here, I must demur.

What are the consequences of such a demurral for a reading of Thompson’s book? For one thing, it helps one see certain blindnesses. While she is quite right to underscore the importance of Murdoch’s “race-baiting, fear-mongering, and rage-generating information machine” in the 80s and 90s to the shaping of “white Americans' understanding of their interests and how best to fulfill them” (435), she is blind to a corresponding emergence, more or less at the same time, of identity politics on the left side of the political spectrum. This identity politics, too, played a role in white Americans' self-understanding. As different groups came to insist on collective identities articulated, whether as articles of faith or out of political expediency, in terms of essential differences pertaining to race, gender, sexuality, and so forth, whiteness began to appear in its difference from these identities. What was once taken so for granted - whiteness - as to be unseen was increasingly subject to qualification: the white heterosexual male not only was no longer able to simply assume himself to be everywhere, he increasingly found himself on the national stage, isolated and, to his not-too-far-seeing eyes, emasculated. It is this man - and it is worth noting that Thompson never explicitly thematizes gender difference in her book - who becomes Fox News’ most avid viewer, who becomes a loud, gun-packing supporter of the NRA, who becomes a champion of Bernie Goetz in 1984 and of Kyle Rittenhouse in 2020, and, finally, who becomes proud MAGA today. It is at least in part the identity politics of the left - politics that, at certain moments and in certain, albeit not unqualified, ways, I support - that allowed Rupert Murdoch to look at this white male and see green.

Fear and Fury is, in this sense, one-sided. This one-sideness leads Thompson to make terribly naive statements at times that have the effect of undermining her book’s overall credibility. To claim, for example, that American universities “had (...) become a target for white resentment and rage” because “[w]hite working-class families that could no longer afford to send their children to college were told that this was the fault of the liberal elites who ran universities, as opposed to the decades-long stripping of financial aid and other measures that had made obtaining a college education possible for so many in the 1960s and 1970s” (429) exonerates universities of any responsibility for their increasing unaffordability. On this point, Thompson would be well-advised to read Josh Mitchell’s The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe, which exposes how universities and big banks colluded to game the federal student loan programs in order to fill each other’s coffers, all while saddling more and more students with ever-growing mountains of debt.

Thompson’s book is prone to such naivety, and any attempt to engage rigorously with it must account for this propensity. Yet however disappointing it can be at times to find Thompson merely repeating suspect orthodoxies, this does not make her book any less necessary, or any less necessary to read. The story she tells is one too often overlooked - to the detriment of us all. When ICE murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026, they demonstrated to anyone with eyes to read that as soon as Black Lives Don’t Matter, in principle no one’s does. In the eyes of a certain white vigilance, whether that of a vigilante-wannabe or of ICE, we are all Black as soon as they imagine we’re in their way. It is a Blackness we should embrace and wear with pride. So read Thompson’s book, see what she sees too clearly - but be sure to linger over the “too.”

[Brock Sawyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full of editorial bias. The author’s use of capitalization for Blacks and Browns and not capitalizing whites is not grammatically correct.

The inconsistency breaks the rhythm of trust between writer and reader. It signals that the author isn’t just describing the world—but correcting you while doing it.

That’s why it feels abrasive. That’s why it feels moralized. That’s why it made me want to close the book.

I’m responding not just to typography—but to being preached at through punctuation.

Heather Ann Thompson is making a normative choice, not a descriptive one. She’s not just reporting history; she’s positioning herself morally inside it.

That’s bias by definition.

Bias doesn’t mean malice.
Bias means commitment to a framework.

And this framework says:
• Certain identities deserve linguistic elevation
• Others should remain unmarked—or even linguistically minimized

That’s not neutral scholarship. It’s advocacy through style.

The story itself is heartbreaking and doesn’t need advocacy or what some call “wokeism” to get a point across. Just tell the facts in a grammatically correct and equal way.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Achor and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of Heather Ann Thompson’s detailed and compelling new book Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. I was floored by the events in this book, and I’m glad that Thompson has re-examined the facts of this case, including the lives of Goetz’s victims, James Ramesuer, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, and Troy Canty. While Thompson’s book accomplishes many things, one of the most important is to humanize these victims who were degraded and criminalized for being young Black men in NYC not only by the violent judgement of Bernie Goetz, but also by the emerging NYC tabloid press, The NY Post, which was acquired by Rupert Murdoch in the late 1970s. Thompson details how Reagan’s cultivation of white resentment through targeting civil rights and poverty initiatives from the 1930s through the 1960s led to his election and mandate to cut government waste, with the unstated consequences of easing taxes for the aristocracy and corporations. Whether it was magical thinking or just a kind of splashy statement that would silence critics, the trickle down economics never happened, and income inequality worsened as those in big cities and those who lived below the poverty line saw reductions in services and aid that helped with everything from accessing food, housing and education. Sound familiar? In reading this, it was hard to stomach the ways that conservatives have repurposed Reagan’s failed ideas, ignoring the damage it wrought to all Americans, but in particular the injustices and inequalities that deepened for Black Americans. However, while Thompson draws parallels between society and politics in America today and America 40-45 years ago, the main focus of this book is on how this context set the stage for the kind of vigilantism that Bernhard Goetz was allowed to perpetuate on 4 Black teenagers in a NYC subway in 1984.
While I don’t remember when this even occurred, I do remember some aspects of the trial, which occurred significantly after it happened. I also think that Wu-Tang Clan’s “Clan in da Front” helped to remind me about “Bernhard Geotz what he deserves,” shouting out the kind of injustice and violence that was a part of being young and Black in NYC in the 80s and 90s. Regardless, it was shocking to learn more about this case and the way that it played out in the media, which ended up shaping not only public opinion, but also that of the jury. A majority of the book details the actual shooting, its aftermath, and the trial, which took place nearly 3 years after the shooting. Thompson’s research and retelling lets us know about the lives of both the teenage victims and their shooter. It was interesting to learn about Bernie’s own troubles with authority, his inability to hold a job, and his disgust with NYC. Although his family moved to Orlando after his father was revealed to have inappropriate relationships with young boys, I was surprised that Bernie never moved there since he seemed to really despise the city. Furthermore, Thompson shares the challenges that the boys experienced as NYC slipped into debt and in particular the Bronx experienced a series of fires in the late 70s. The city takes on its own important role in Thompson’s book, noting how crime, cuts, politics, economics, race, and growing diversity with urban flight all played roles in heightening tensions and distrust among different groups of people. In fact, as Thompson presents the shooting and the trials of Goetz, we see how biases and beliefs were already shaped based on the perceptions of the events, rather than the actual evidence or outcomes. I was shocked to see the ways that these boys were convicted in public without any kind of trial. There was no presumption of innocence for them, and yet, the man who actually pulled the trigger, who shockingly went back to shoot Darrell Cabey, telling him he didn’t look so bad, was applauded, rewarded, and treated as a hero in the city, although not by all. The boys were repeatedly referred to as criminals, violent thugs, whose intention was to rob, yet they were not even tried or charged with any crimes. It was shocking, but also not surprising in the examination of the history of white rage and vigilantism, which Thompson presents more recent examples of Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, and most recently Jordan Neely, whose killer was invited to watch the Army Navy football game with the president and vice president. Thompson also mentions other prominent extrajudicial killings, including acquitted murderer Kyle Rittenhouse, to show how Goetz’s trial and acquittal on more serious charges wasn’t a bug, but rather a feature of the American justice system that often allows for violence and a wide berth of “self-defense” for some citizens, but not others. Thompson’s book helps to highlight how Goetz’s trial was conducted not just in the courtroom, but also in the court of public opinion, and helped to leverage the kind of white rage and fear that presented him as a sympathetic figure to many in NYC, rather than the violent, paranoid thug he was.
The entire book was shocking, especially when we consider the consequences of Goetz’s decision to shoot these boys, and how it impacted their lives, as well as the lives of those around them. Darrell Cabey, who was paralyzed and as a result of injuries to his spine and lungs, experienced oxygen deprivation that led to brain damage, is given the most attention in the book. However, all of the boys experienced physical and psychological consequences as a result of Goetz’s violence. In one of the most shocking moments of the book, Thompson details Cabey’s family’s attempts to sue Goetz in civil litigation mainly to help cover costs of the constant care required for him. Darrell was not only paralyzed, but had limited memory, which required help with daily tasks and bodily functions. Goetz, now serving as his own lawyer, requested to depose Cabey (and his mom), believing that Cabey was faking his injuries and brain damage for money. It’s hard to believe that someone who purposefully shot an unarmed teen, leading to paralysis and brain damage, would be so cynical and callous. What was even more shocking was that the judge, after several reports from physicians detailing Cabey’s mental capacity, would allow this deposition to occur. I’m curious to learn other’s perspectives on how utterly inhumane and degraded Goetz is after thinking that someone would fake brain damage for money.
In addition to Goetz’s disgusting behavior, it was also shocking to learn that he not only went on the run for more than a week after the shooting, fleeing to New Hampshire, but also that he eventually turned himself in, making a full confession after waiving his right to counsel. Despite acknowledging the boys posed no real threat and that he intended to violently harm and kill these boys, Goetz was acquitted of murder. Thompson provides a postmortem that goes through the jury’s reasoning, based on interviews and one of the jurist’s memoir of the trial. I won’t get into those details, but it was shocking to see the kinds of inferences they make to lead to an acquittal. Thompson’s book is a shocking, but important read today, especially as violence, both institutional and physical, continues to escalate. In the last section, Thompson details the more modern analogues for the Goetz shooting and trial, and how other cases and more recently racial violence and white rage have been increasing under Trump. While it’s not the main focus in the book, it does serve an important reminder and as a warning about how marshalling this kind of resentment and rage can have violent and dire consequences. Truly an important book to read in 2026. Highly recommended!

[Greg Talbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

American history is full of trials where the individuals have faced persecution and undue punishment. Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution is widely considered to have been wrongly convicted and based upon anti-immigrant hostilities. The Haymarket Affair (1886) in Chicago saw the wrongful conviction and execution of those labeled anarchists. Anti-war sentiments were criminalized with the Espionage Act in 1918, and leaders like Eugene Debs were jailed for speaking out against the jingoism of American leadership. When Lady Justice is rebuffed, the myths tell us another Greek God appears, who will give what is due to those who deserve it, or in other words retribution. The greek god Nemesis comes to cleanse the arrogant and the wicked, when jurisprudence breaks down.

In “Fear and Fury”, Heather Ann Thompson describes the New York transit car shooting of four men, Troy Canty, Barry Allen, James Ramseur and Darrell Cabey, by the aggrieved vigilante Bernie Gantz. A senseless act of violence is portrayed with the underpinnings of a darker social story about the turbulent 1980s, where social trust and social good were fraying. The Reagan 1980s brought the forces of financial deregulation, anti-”new deal” legislation, a retributive justice system that disproportionately punished minorities, and the tabloid centric new media of emotion headlines by the Murdoch empire. The violence that took place is inexplicable without the understanding of the paranoid vicious psychology of Gentz, and the directionless and squashed opportunities for the young men abroad the train. The shooting would shake New York and the nation as a story framed by race. To many white americans - it was a story of a bootstrapping individual who became heroic by shooting young thugs. To many black americans - it was a story of attempted murder and a tragedy of young men subjected to the violence of a racist society.

Thompson chronicles the criminal and subsequent civil trial against Gentz, along with the media sensationism and racism that swayed public opinion against the four men. Thompson describes the excess and materialism that shows up in media from the 1980s, like Wall Street or The Bonfire of the Vanities, but also captures a more frightening and vengeful distrustfulness. Thompson writes “By the late 1980s, everyday life in America has come to feel like a trip though the looking glass - both thrilling and terrifying depending on who you were”. The lack of trust in institutions, and the threats of muggings, and a burgeoning crack epidemic contributed to white flight and racialized tensions. Despite the polled approval of Gentz’s shooting of the four black teens - the situation is complicated significantly by the preponderance of evidence of a premeditated murder. Gentz’s language, in a confession tape that swayed jurors in a civil case, steely and explicitly language, was gushing with hatred and fear. In both the criminal and civil trial, Thompsons describes the teenage boys victimhood. From the selected jury harboring prejudice, harassment from Gentz, life altering medical outcomes and lack of financial resources from advocacy groups, the four young men, despite being victims of premeditated violence, were judged to be the perpetrators.

Racialized violence continued and continues to be a shameful stain on our country’s founding ideals. Only a few years later, the case of the Central Park Five, would indict another group of young black men, wrongly, for rape and sodomy. Later they would be exonerated by semen analysis, but not before serving years in jail and public execution support by Donald J. Trump - who himself would be convicted of rape by E. Jean Carroll in 2023. With continue documentation of police brutality, from Rodney King to George Floyd, the perpetual violence of state and vigiliant actors on black americans is a reminder that justice is not equality distributed.

The respectability politics of the 1980s Reagan Republican politics, despite the hypocritical behavior of many social conservatives, is a distant past from the current Republician party; oh how much worst things have become with the hostile takeover by Donald Trump in 2016. Trump, who is as wealthy as he is classless, made in the image of the MAGA movement, is a creature of the same reactionary politics of the 1980s New York. The full-throatled racism of Bernie Gentz is alive and well in the base. The hostility toward minorities, the cruelty and violence of state-sponsored ICE agents, and the distain for those who don't buy into the white-washed myths of America. This is the brittle foundation of the MAGA movement. From exonerating Charlottesville Nazis, to the lies about Haitian immigrants, to the deplorable statements about President Obama, Trump remains the poisionous root, and a grotesque example of white rage and impunity. He is unable to lead and so he pushes he politics of grievance. Protecting his pedophile pals, pardoning January 6th rioters, dishonoring fallen soldiers and attempting to overthrow the 2020 election are all reasons, are part of his dismal legacy, and are all reasons why Lady Justice weeps..and for Nemesis patiently grows.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a universe where this gets a bland review, the book being a summary of the crimes and trials of the 1984 NYC subway shooter Bernhard Goetz, that puts his story into the context of a media ecosystem that led to the racist Nationalism of the moment in the United States. It is good, though overlong.

That this review is not is predicated on a red flag that showed up early in the book, where the author describes someone (Goetz’ father) getting off on a technicality. What this consists of is not explained, and my research has not turend up the answer.

This is relevant for the book. To quote Justice William Brennan:

You in the media ought to be ashamed of yourselves to call the provisions and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights 'Technicalities'. They're not. We are what we are because of those guarantees.

Berine Goetz is a monster. No hedging. The book describes his evil comprehensively.* It is moral to consider Goetz a monster, motivated by racial animus, and the sort of response that he provoked in the white community at large equally racist and monstrous.

But in a book holding itself out as being about a failure in the justice system, the authorial choices here frustrate the message.

I hesitate to catalog my gripes because I have a deep sense of empathy with where the author is going here and what she is trying to do. You could write a book that tells the story from the perspective of the righteous outrage at it. But in this book feeling more like an audition for the next season of American Crime Story, the criteria for what constitutes a well-argued book on the topic has a different weight. To paraphrase Ken White, there is an odd function that happens when people look at the carceral state and end up feeling that the problem is that it is not more unjust, and if only the right people got hurt things would be okay, rather than it being a system that structural inequities elsewhere poison the process.

...which is a big problem for the book, because it wants to make an argument concerning structural inequities, so there is a whole separate argument plastered over the more narrative history. The text treats the Goetz assault as the cornerstone of a sociological argument about the birth of the contemporary Nationalist movement in the United States. In short, white people, having benefited the most by government social programs, 'pulled up the ladder' in the eighties, cutting those same programs or otherwise not expanding them. Thus, criminality is better understood as a structural, rather than behavioral, but things like the story of Goetz become a way for white Americans to justify denying others the advantages that they themselves received: criminality not poverty is the problem.

The irony in this is that the focus on Goetz to make this argument concedes too much to its detractors. The author's interpretation is one I share, or close enough for government work. But instead of constructing a sociological argument to establish it, the book treats Goetz as a sort of proof in and of itself. I get why this sort of thing happens, first and foremost because the Goetz story is one we keep seeing of someone doing something bad and instead of appropriate condemnation, various grifters come into the scene and turn the figure into a profit center, but also because with Goetz, some of the more notable figures are still around; still grifting.

But to make the argument, you have to make the argument. The closest we come here is more narrative description of the media enterprise creates and perpetuates spectacle like this, and misinformation around these events. The book tacitly accepts the Hillbilly Elegy myth, and while amply describing racist moments, overt and covert, this bigger goal to explain contemporary Nationalism is unfinished. It is frustrating to live in a world where people are urging media to take moral stands, the media not doing so because they have literally been bought, but to have a book make one, yet in a manner that subjects it to criticism.

My thanks to the author, Heather Ann Thompson, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, for making the ARC available to me.

* - I wish that the trope about how white men get to be crazy while Black men must be criminals was not a trope. Goetz reads as particularly mentally ill to me, in a way that makes himself a danger to himself and others. The paradox of Goetz perhaps is that the same sort of forces that this book suggests created him - Regan's destruction of social services - might have provided him with the actual help he needed. As opposed to an illegal firearm.

[Mike Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard an interview of the author and realized I didn't know much about the story of four black teenagers (19-year-olds Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and Darrell Cabey, and 18-year-old James Ramseur) who were murdered in cold blood by white 37-year old Bernie Goetz in December 1984. Another book focused more on the legal proceedings came out in Jan 2026 on the same shooting (Five Bullets, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Heather Thompson did an excellent job introducing the poverty of the South Bronx, where the teenagers were from, and contrasting that with the childhood of Bernie Goetz in the bucolic countryside in New York State. His father, successful but absent due to long hours, was fond of young boys and was arrested and tried for fondling some fifteen year olds after plying them with liquor.. Young Bernie at age ten attended the trial. His parents at age twelve sent Bernie and his sister off to a Swiss boarding school, where he remained for four years. He didn't get along with others as he started his work career, and eventually settled into a single apartment after a brief marriage, in 1975.
The four teenagers childhoods are outlined with some discussion of the shift in the eighties towards lower taxes, less social support and less support for cities with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, as well as the collapse of New York city in 1975 under Mayor Beame. The city was broke, and the garbage was piling up (Dec 1981 crisis) and cocaine and the new form crack was mushrooming. The new disease AIDS was on the rise, and the lack of city control of the drug epidemic due to poor finances led the city to the boiling point. Circumstances were ripe for a Bernie Goetz, the so called subway vigilante, to take matters into his own hands. New York City was a scary place, and when Troy Canty asked Bernie for five dollars, Bernie started shooting. He had an illegal unlicensed handgun and five bullets, which he emptied at the four teenagers. The New York Post was purchased by Rupert Murdoch, and they led the sensational reporting around the murders, stoking the fear and rage of New Yorkers.
There are a number of videos on youtube showing the Dec 1984 interview of Goetz with the police which I recommend watching. He confessed and yet he was only convicted in 1987 of the weapons charge. Goetz was acquitted of the attempted-murder and first-degree-assault charges and convicted of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree for carrying a loaded, unlicensed weapon in a public place. Civil litigation followed, and he was convicted, but lived his life as he pleased while one of the victims with a spinal cord injury faced lifelong care. The other victims lived troubled lives as well.
I think this story is so relevant even today. The fear and fury remains high as the most innocent in society face violence, societal neglect and the federal government and state governments turn their backs on the poor and middle class and pass a huge tax cut favoring the wealthy. Gun violence has mushroomed, and today Bernie would be able to legally conceal carry his weapon, so would not have faced weapons charges.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Rating: 4.5* of five
Watch this YouTube video of the author discussing the book:
https://youtu.be/tr08AgSFbfc?si=B02WZ...

The Publisher Says: In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson reveals how the infamous New York subway shooting of 1984 divided a nation, unveiling the potent cocktail of rage and resentment that ushered in a new era of white vigilante violence.

On December 22, 1984, white New Yorker Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers at point-blank in a New York City subway car. Goetz slipped into the subway tunnels undetected, fleeing the city to evade capture. From the moment Goetz turned himself in, the narrative surrounding the shooting became a matter of extraordinary debate, igniting public outcry and capturing the attention of the nation.

While Goetz's guilt was never in question, media outlets sensationalized the event, redirecting public ire toward the victims themselves. In the end, it would take two grand juries and a civil suit to achieve justice on behalf of the four Black teenagers. For some, Goetz would go on to become a national hero, inciting a disturbing new chapter in American history. This brutal act revealed a white rage and resentment much deeper, larger, and more insidious than the actions of Bernie Goetz himself. Intensified by politicians and tabloid media, it would lead a stunning number of white Americans to celebrate vigilantism as a fully legitimate means for addressing racial fear, fracturing American race relations.

Drawing from never-before-seen and archival interviews, newspaper accounts, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the social and political conditions which set the stage for these events, delving into the lives of Goetz and his four victims—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The most powerful, privileged, cosseted, spoiled class of people in the entire history of the planet feel aggrieved and put-upon by those hugely less fortunate than themselves. It is the single biggest victory ever won by a lie over the truth. This is the story of one of the most important moments in the long campaign to weaponize class struggle...downwards.

A similar, racialized effort has been just as stunningly successful, much of it supercharged by the crime committed by Goetz. There are now "stand your ground laws" in many states, one of which got George Zimmerman off a murder conviction in the case of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman is now 42; Martin died at seventeen. Goetz is 79. Darrell Cabey is a paraplegic with the functional capacity of an eight-year-old. But Goetz is a hero to a lot of (mostly) white people because he shot a bunch of aggressive, stupid teenagers because he "felt threatened."

In reading this careful, unimpeachably sourced story of how this came to pass and the world that's followed the crime it details, I got angrier and angrier. It was my New York, the one I moved to, that was being described; yet I felt unfamiliar with it, unable to imagine myself in this city. I was admittedly young; I had little more than the rudiments of a social conscience, or an honest awareness of racial injustice; but to learn so very much I absolutely had no idea about or access to? Humbling. Infuriating, because of what I was learning.

If you're willing to go on a long, well-footnoted trip into the ugliest part of US white mens' psyches, if you'd like to know why I cheered and clapped when Hinckley made his attempt to rid us of Reagan, if you weren't even born when these events transpired and just wonder how shit got so fucked up in this country, read this book.

It's not light reading. It's serviceable writing, it never ignited my excitement; but it's not poorly done, not boring, not awkward. It does what this kind of non-fiction is meant to do. That's a good thing, if not a toe-tingling one. I hope you'll keep it in mind, get it from the library, see if you find a sale on it in one format or another. It's well worth your time.

[SuzeishReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it’s possible that the Bernie Goetz subway shooting of 1984 may be one of the most significant misremembered, misunderstood events of its decade, “You’re Wrong About” style.

I also think that, now more than ever, it’s important that we remember and understand the causes and conditions of the social and political explosions of our past, so that we can do our best not to repeat them, or at the very least use them to help us understand how we got here and what might be done next.

It was for these two reasons that I wanted to read Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.

Fear and Fury is really, I think, several parallel stories. It’s the more or less straightforwardly factual detailing of the actual shooting, immediate aftermath, and trial revolving around Bernhard Goetz’s shooting of four Black teenagers on a NYC subway train. It’s a story about people: partly about Goetz, but also, thankfully, about the four young men whose lives he changed by his assault. And it’s also about how social and political pressures made the shooting possible, and how they affected the legal outcome and the public reaction to the case; how the Reagan policies of the 80s cut social safety nets, increased crime rates, put people who were already struggling on edge; and how the New York media stoked the flames of already simmering racial and economic tensions. Lastly, it’s about why this story still matters: how it’s easy to look at this event from 40 years ago and understand how we still feel its reverberations, how some things may have changed but others painfully haven’t; there’s no way we can hope that something like this won’t happen again if we fail to internalize why it happened in the first place, and why current events still flow from that moment in time.

I think Thompson is an excellent writer who demonstrates both thoroughness and care in telling an important story. I’m always drawn to the stories of the things that have shaped New York and its inhabitants, and in turn how New York’s actions and reactions have impacted the rest of the country, so to me, this is definitely a book worth reading and recommending. For fans of true crime, politics, and sociology, this one will keep you pissed off and on the edge of your seat.