Fear and Fury
The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.
"A gripping and powerful account of one of the 20th century's most important criminal cases." --James Foreman Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own
On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.
Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans.
Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This insightful if dense history from Pulitzer Prize winner Thompson (Blood in the Water) revisits the infamous 1984 New York City subway shooting of four Black teenagers by white 37-year-old Bernhard Goetz. Thompson begins by recapping the lives of Goetz and victim Darrell Cabey in the shooting's lead-up, juxtaposing Goetz's anxious acquisition of illegal firearms after a mugging with Cabey's listlessness after dropping out of school. The shooting itself is depicted with bloody detail, heightening the horror of Goetz being "heralded... as a hero" by many white New Yorkers. Also examined is the hotly debated criminal trial, where Goetz was acquitted, and the later civil trial that found him liable. Along the way, Thompson spotlights harrowing discrimination against the teens, including the Crime Victim Board denying them compensation for not being "innocent" victims and the civil defense's gross attempts to prove that a paralyzed Cabey was "faking" brain damage. Arguing that Goetz's shooting "unleashed and normalized" a new strain of "white rage," Thompson devotes the concluding section to tracking the mainstreaming of that rage, from Rupert Murdoch's founding of Fox News to the rise of Donald Trump. This section, however, can get lost in the weeds, with ponderous asides, such as how President Biden's Child Tax Credit "would have made a huge difference to the five Cabey kids." Still, it's a searing critique of white America's racial resentments.
