Fear and Fury

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A Most Anticipated Book from The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, Vulture, Barnes & Noble, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, KMUW, The Stacks, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Reality Blurred

“A timely, brilliantly documented re-examination of the 1980s and the lingering hostility to the Civil Rights movement. Fear and Fury thoughtfully explores the demands of racial equality and carefully details America’s often-violent resistance to racial justice.”
—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy

“This book is like a secret decoder ring for all those trying to understand the politics of white rage today. In Fear and Fury, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson delivers a breathtaking and unflinching account of how the Reagan era—and one violent encounter on a New York subway—reignited a national politics of white fear. Moving from the South Bronx to the corridors of power, Thompson exposes how racial anxiety, economic abandonment, and media hysteria fused to justify oppression and criminalize the most vulnerable. This history reminds us that only by reckoning with the roots of fear and fury can we ever hope to build a democracy that truly honors the dignity and humanity of us all.”
—Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

“[Thompson] writes expansively about the Goetz case as both a reflection of a city torn apart by neoliberal neglect and a harbinger of what she calls ‘the rebirth of white rage’. . . . Vibrant, powerful and moving.”
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“[Thompson] vividly revisit[s] the 1984 subway shooting that gripped the country. . . . [and] effectively link[s] the shooting to more recent incidents involving a deadly cocktail of racial stereotypes, the overzealous use of force—if not outright vigilantism—countenanced in the name of self-defense and broadening gun rights.”
—The Washington Post

“Embraced by the media after he shot four Black teenagers on the New York City subway, Bernie Goetz was the vigilante poster boy of the 1980s, a folk hero to millions. . . . Heather Ann Thompson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water, spins this narrative on its head, centering Goetz’s victims while illuminating the rise of tabloid journalism and early stirrings of disinformation culture.”
—TIME Magazine

“Written with heart and precision, Fear and Fury captures New York at its breaking point and traces how a city’s panic became a nation’s policy. It’s an extraordinary act of witness and understanding, alive on every page with urgency and truth.”
—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove

“Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury provides . . . [a] detailed reconstruction [of the Goetz shootings]—very much in the vein of her excellent, indignant history of the Attica prison uprising. . . . She treats the Goetz episode as the first whitecap on the surge of racial rage that rose with the Reagan era and has carried into our own.”
—The New Yorker

“Powerful. . . . [Thompson] has painted a sharply accurate contextual picture of 1980s America and shown readers how to see that decade as the seed bed for our current national difficulties.”
—The Boston Globe

“Riveting . . . [Thompson] examines the Goetz case with a keen eye on today, drawing direct and haunting connections between the ‘white rage’ that revealed itself after the 1984 shootings and the abhorrent increase in violence against people of Color today.”
—Harper’s Bazaar

“[Thompson’s new book] explores fear, how it has become one of the most powerful forces in American life, powerful enough to excuse violence, shape policy and decide whose lives matter. . . . [She] argues the [Goetz] case marked a political turning point when white racial fear was sanctioned by law and leveraged by elites who learned how useful fear could be.”
—NPR

“Required reading.”
—Ms. Magazine

“Thompson’s deeply researched account [of the Bernie Goetz case] becomes a through line to the present: the event that, against a backdrop of growing inequality and racial resentment in the early 1980s, first gave legal cover to white vigilantism, creating a template increasingly embraced on the right today.”
—The New York Times

“Powerful. . . . Thompson explores the [Goetz shootings’] roots in the [1980s’] stark racial and economic divisions and argues that the incident has had a pernicious effect on our contemporary political culture. . . . As a historian, Thompson is interested in the long shadow of these events of four decades ago. . . . Most significantly, Thompson posits that the shootings ‘unleashed and normalized a new era of racialized rage.’ She sees the influence of the Goetz case in the spread of what are often called ‘stand your ground’ state laws and in the actions of George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Daniel Penny—all, in her words, ‘ordinary men’ who ‘[meted] out extralegal punishment’ and were subsequently acquitted of most or all of the charges against them. . . . Thompson suggests that taken to their extremes, fear and fury can threaten democracy itself.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury brings to life Bernhard Goetz’s shooting of four Black teenagers on a New York subway in 1984, a moment that exposed the ugly reality of America’s racial divide. With vivid prose and meticulous research, Thompson shows that we have yet to truly overcome the malign effects of racial animus.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth, and Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University

“A magnum opus that balances sensitive storytelling and fully realized characters with illuminating history—required reading for anyone interested in understanding the centrality of violence in American society.”
—Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“Heather Ann Thompson has once again produced a defining work of American history with Fear and Fury. She provides not only a sweeping and indispensable account of Bernhard Goetz’s horrific actions but also excavates the larger backdrop of cultural and political forces that weaponized white rage during the 1980s and beyond. Readers will be moved by the care and dignity Thompson brings to the stories of Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—the four Black teenagers whose lives were forever changed during that fateful subway ride—forcing a reckoning with the human cost of vigilante violence. Fear and Fury is a monumental achievement that exposes the roots of the nation’s current crisis and serves as an urgent message to resist the manufactured fear that threatens the resilience of democracy itself.”
—Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire

“A gripping and powerful account of one of the 20th century’s most important criminal cases.”
—James Forman Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own and J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School

“Heather Ann Thompson revisits the [Goetz] case. . . . A granular examination of the shooting, the trial, and the civil case brought by Cabey, this work also explains the incident’s enduring impact on American society. Thompson traces a path from then to now, a period when right-wing news outlets peddle a constant narrative that New York is again a lawless city on the brink of destruction. . . . A worthwhile read.”
—Irish Examiner

“A comprehensive account of a vicious outburst that shook New York four decades ago. . . . [Thompson] elucidates how the incident still has a malign influence. . . . and excels when exploring the broader trends that led to the shooting and the ‘throughline’ connecting Goetz to ‘the America of President Donald Trump’. . . . [Thompson’s] skill for historical dot-connecting makes this a worthy, informative book.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Thompson names Ronald Reagan’s cuts to the social safety net as the original sin of the 1980s. She charts the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which capitalized on racial resentments and economic anxieties of fear­ful, angry white New Yorkers who were disenchanted with liberal solutions to social prob­lems. . . . But the heart of Fear and Fury is twin courtroom dramas: the criminal trial of Goetz for the shootings and a civil trial seek­ing financial damages for one of his victims. . . . In Thompson’s capable hands, the Goetz saga, and its relation­ship to the present day, gets the messy resolution it deserves.”
—BookPage, starred review

“Insightful. . . . A searing critique of white America’s racial resentments.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A true story of injustice—in which Goetz got off unscathed while the teens paid for the rest of their lives—against a background of economic inequality accelerated by Republican economic and social policies, racial animosity and vigilante adulation fanned by Murdoch’s divisive media empire, and the NRA’s burgeoning political muscle. . . . Insightful. . . . Convincing.”
—Booklist