Fear and Fury cover art

Fear and Fury

The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

Preview
Subscribe now Free with 30-day trial
Offer ends on 14 April, 2026 at 23:59.
Prime logo
Pay ₹5/month for 2 months and ₹199/month after 2 months, Cancel anytime. Offer ends on 14 April 2026 at 23:59. Take this offer!
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep.
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks.
Download titles to your library and listen offline.
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Fear and Fury

Written by: Heather Ann Thompson
Narrated by: Erin Bennett
Subscribe now Free with 30-day trial

Pay ₹5/month for 2 months and ₹199/month after 2 months, Cancel anytime. Offer ends on 14 April 2026 at 23:59.

₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹1,407.00

Buy Now for ₹1,407.00

LIMITED TIME OFFER | Get 2 Months for ₹5/month

About this listen

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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.

"A gripping and powerful account of one of the 20th century's most important criminal cases." --James Foreman Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own


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.
Politics & Government Public Policy Social
No reviews yet