Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016).
Her next book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan 80s, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026).
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On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. The man the tabloid media dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans experiencing the fallout of the Reagan 1980s—urban decay, budget cuts, aggressive policing, and a harsh antidrug policy. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims became the villains.
Out of this dramatic moment emerged an angry nation in which media, especially Rupert Murdoch’s expanding empire, stoked the fear and fury of a stunning number of Americans.
Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations while deftly recovering the lives of the boys who too many decided didn’t matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account of these pivotal events and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.
Early Praise…..
"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
“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 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
“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
Blood in the Water also won the Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council for Crime and Delinquency, and the book also received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Blood in the Water was long listed for the Cundill Prize in History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Upon its release Blood in the Water was prominently reviewed and profiled in the New York Times in four different sections, and Thompson herself was profiled in the highly-coveted “Talk” section in the New York Times Magazine. Blood in the Water ultimately landed on fourteen “Best of 2016” lists including the New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016 list, and ones published by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and others.
The book also received rave reviews in over 100 top popular publications, and Thompson appeared on over 25 television shows, including PBS Newshour, CBS Sunday Morning and the Daily Show, as well as on over 50 radio programs, including Sirius and NPR.
