MixedThe BafflerUnderscores the enormity of the injustice done to Canty, Ramseur, Cabey, and Allen ... Offers a clarifying look at the pernicious interlacing of race, crime, and capitalism surrounding Goetz’s attack and the ensuing trials ... Thompson’s desire to narrow Goetz into a Trumpian omen muddies her book’s analytic lens. Thompson frequently overdetermines the link between Goetz and Trump ... In other words, Thompson’s clunky Trump connection ultimately serves a tired narrative of liberal absolution ... This selective, almost mercenary approach to retelling the histories of racialized trauma and black (near-)death is not only ethically murky and extractive. It’s also bad history, misleading readers to taper their understanding of how racial fascism works at a time when razor clarity around such forces is sorely needed. We can, and must, expect better.
PanThe BafflerWilliams suffers from an amateurish incuriosity that denudes the story of its politics and reproduces the racialized frame that characterized the outcome of the case at the time ... Refuses a serious analysis of the racism that motivated Goetz’s crime and his acquittal ... Williams twists himself into knots trying to protect the sanctity of the U.S. criminal legal system ... Five Bullets is so pusillanimous in its determinations, so mealymouthed in its account of Goetz’s monstrous crimes, that it is, in the most generous interpretation, a boilerplate rehashing of a true crime melodrama, barely a notch above Court TV.
