Skillfully exploring the link between an infamous subway attack and mean-spirited politics.
Vigilantism roils the nation.
Thompson, a Pulitzer winner for Blood in the Water, her history of a 1971 prison uprising, not only presents a comprehensive account of a vicious outburst that shook New York four decades ago. She also elucidates how the incident still has a malign influence. On December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a 37-year-old Manhattanite, shot four Black teens on a city subway. The victims, she writes, were “boisterous,” but Goetz, an unabashed bigot, said he didn’t feel threatened. “If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again,” he told police. The victims survived but were forever changed, Thompson writes. One suffered brain damage and would spend his life in a wheelchair; another “deliberately overdosed” on the 27th anniversary of the shooting. Goetz, meanwhile, gained numerous white admirers. He signed autographs, received a Good Samaritan award, and did under a year in prison. Thompson thoroughly covers the court proceedings, but she truly excels when exploring the broader trends that led to the shooting and the “throughline” connecting Goetz to “the America of President Donald Trump.” Digging into Ronald Reagan’s policies—tax cuts for the rich, funding decreases for city services—she explains how high unemployment and underfunded schools in urban neighborhoods were among the “larger forces working against” the victims. Subsequently, the “white racial rage” supporting Goetz empowered right-wing organizations like the NRA, politicians like Rudy Giuliani, whose stop-and-frisk policing openly discriminated against people of color, and media organizations like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which championed Goetz and honed a belligerent conservatism now seen by millions of Murdoch’s Fox News viewers. Thompson’s prose can be repetitive—more than two dozen sentences start with the phrase “what is more”—but her skill for historical dot-connecting makes this a worthy, informative book.
Skillfully exploring the link between an infamous subway attack and mean-spirited politics.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593702093
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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