FEAR AND FURY

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.