Book Review: 'Fear and Fury' Connects 1984 Shooting to Trump

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By TRH Book Desk

The Pulitzer Winner’s Latest Book Turns the Bernie Goetz Case into a Sweeping History of Reagan-Era Politics and American Racial Resentment

July 2026 — Heather Ann Thompson built her reputation on making archival history feel urgent — her Pulitzer-winning Blood in the Water did it for the 1971 Attica uprising. In Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage, she applies the same method to a case most Americans over 50 remember instinctively: the December 1984 night a white subway rider named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers who approached him for money, then fled the city before eventually surrendering to police.

Thompson’s central move is refusing to let Goetz stay the story. She reconstructs the lives of his four victims — Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty and James Ramseur — with the same care she gives Goetz’s own anxious, gun-acquiring years after an earlier mugging.

Publishers Weekly noted that the book depicts the shooting itself in graphic detail, underscoring the disturbing reality that Goetz was celebrated as a hero by many white New Yorkers in its aftermath.

From One Subway Car to a National Argument

What distinguishes Fear and Fury from a straightforward true-crime account is its scope. Thompson brackets the Goetz story with an argument about Reaganomics, austerity and the media ecosystem — particularly Rupert Murdoch’s rise — that she says converted one man’s panic into a template for decades of racialized fear. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, reviewing the book, wrote that Thompson treats the shooting as an early sign of the surge in racial resentment that began under Reagan and has continued into the present.

That thesis is also where critics push back hardest. In The Week’s review roundup, Boston Globe critic Walton Muyumba is credited with admiring Thompson’s portrait of 1980s New York while arguing that white rage long predates Reagan — indeed, the phenomenon is described as older than the country itself.

The Courtroom Is Where the Book Earns Its Power

Reviewers consistently single out the book’s dual trial narrative — Goetz’s criminal acquittal and the later civil suit that found him liable — as its strongest material. The New York Times’ Jennifer Szalai called the book vibrant and moving, and praised how it captures a city at its breaking point.

Kirkus Reviews credited Thompson’s skill at connecting historical dots, describing a throughline running from Goetz to the political era of Donald Trump, and called the result a worthy, informative work.

Thompson doesn’t spare her readers the cruelty that followed the shooting: a state crime-victims board denied compensation to the teens on the grounds they weren’t sufficiently “innocent,” and Goetz’s civil defence team tried to argue that the paralyzed Cabey was faking his brain damage. The book closes not on outrage but on tenderness — a photograph of Cabey, decades later, with his mother.

Why It Lands Now

Fear and Fury arrived on shelves the same week as a competing book on the same case, CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets, which takes a more legal-procedural approach. Comparisons were inevitable, and mostly favoured Thompson: the Times’ Szalai judged her book the more powerful of the two.

Beyond the head-to-head, the timing matters because Thompson wrote the book after living through the first Trump administration and January 6 — and it shows. The Goetz case, in her telling, isn’t a historical curiosity so much as a preview: a moment when tabloid media, economic anxiety and racial fear combined to turn a shooter into a folk hero, and his victims into villains.

The Verdict

For readers of narrative history in the vein of Just Mercy or Thompson’s own Blood in the Water, Fear and Fury delivers a meticulously reported, morally clear account of a case that shaped how America talks about crime, race and self-defence. Its argument about Reagan-era origins is more contestable than its reporting, but even sceptical critics agree the book is a serious, necessary reckoning with a case whose aftershocks are still being felt.