Book Talk: Fear and Fury at the Harvard Book Store with Heather Ann Thompson

Harvard Book Store and the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights welcome Heather Ann Thompson—historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy—for a discussion of her new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. She will be joined in conversation by Elizabeth Hinton—associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and professor of law at Yale Law School.

This event will take place at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138.

About Fear and Fury

In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.

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. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.

Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the 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 whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

Praise for Fear and Fury

"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

Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.

Elizabeth Hinton is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and professor of law at Yale Law School. The author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Hinton lives in New Haven, Connecticut.