Heather Ann Thompson shines 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.
Thompson rejects stereotyping the teens as thuggish stickup kids. Instead, she crafts social, personal, and familial narratives to humanize them ... Powerful ... Though she has painted a sharply accurate contextual picture of 1980s America and shown readers how to see that decade as the seed bed for our current national difficulties, Thompson’s argument that Reagan-era politics ignited white rage seems slightly askew.
