Who remembers Bernie Goetz? Who remembers his victims? Or was Bernie Goetz the victim—the subway shooter who, back in 1984, fired at four black teenagers in a crowded subway car in Manhattan because he felt they were threatening other riders and himself.

Heather Ann Thompson.

40 years later, our guest Heather Ann Thompson is digging up doubts—not so much about the case as about all of us who followed it and fixed it on our timeline of social history, of crime, fear, race, and poverty, the city of New York itself and its self-esteem. The book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.

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