Fear and fury The Reagan eighties, the Bernie Goetz shootings, and the rebirth of white rage

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. (Feb.)

Vigilantism roils the nation. Thompson, a Pulitzer winner forBlood 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'sNew 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.