A carefully wrought account that manages some broad sympathy for all sides ... Williams closes with an interview with Goetz, who is allowed to emerge, if not exactly sympathetically, then at least as a three-dimensional figure.
Uses interviews, news accounts and even pop culture to provide readers with a strong sense of the pervasive disorder and fear in Goetz’s New York ... Mr. Williams understands that telling the story properly requires acknowledging the forgotten citizen of New York City in the 1980s—the wary pedestrian and the terrified straphanger.
Williams dedicates much of the book to a play-by-play of the criminal proceedings … Adequate, suffers by inevitable comparison [to Fear and Fury] … He makes a lawyerly distinction between the legal outcome (which he considers ‘supportable and sound’) and morality.
