Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
by Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon, 2026
by Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon, 2026
[Publication date: January 27, 2026]
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.
"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.
REVIEWS:
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Most Anticipated Book from The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, Vulture, Barnes & Noble, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, KMUW, The Stacks, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Reality Blurred
"A timely, brilliantly documented re-examination of the 1980s and the lingering hostility to the Civil Rights movement. Fear and Fury thoughtfully explores the demands of racial equality and carefully details America's often-violent resistance to racial justice."
—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
"This book is like a secret decoder ring for all those trying to understand the politics of white rage today. In Fear and Fury, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson delivers a breathtaking and unflinching account of how the Reagan era—and one violent encounter on a New York subway—reignited a national politics of white fear. Moving from the South Bronx to the corridors of power, Thompson exposes how racial anxiety, economic abandonment, and media hysteria fused to justify oppression and criminalize the most vulnerable. This history reminds us that only by reckoning with the roots of fear and fury can we ever hope to build a democracy that truly honors the dignity and humanity of us all."
—Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow
"[Thompson] writes expansively about the Goetz case as both a reflection of a city torn apart by neoliberal neglect and a harbinger of what she calls 'the rebirth of white rage.' . . . Vibrant, powerful and moving."
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“Embraced by the media after he shot four Black teenagers on the New York City subway, Bernie Goetz was the vigilante poster boy of the 1980s, a folk hero to millions. . . . Heather Ann Thompson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water, spins this narrative on its head, centering Goetz’s victims while illuminating the rise of tabloid journalism and early stirrings of disinformation culture.”
—TIME Magazine
“Written with heart and precision, Fear and Fury captures New York at its breaking point and traces how a city’s panic became a nation’s policy. It’s an extraordinary act of witness and understanding, alive on every page with urgency and truth.”
—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove
“Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury provides . . . [a] detailed reconstruction [of the Goetz shootings]—very much in the vein of her excellent, indignant history of the Attica prison uprising. . . . She treats the Goetz episode as the first whitecap on the surge of racial rage that rose with the Reagan era and has carried into our own.”
—The New Yorker
"Powerful. . . . [Thompson] 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."
—The Boston Globe
"Required reading."
—Ms. Magazine
"Thompson's deeply researched account [of the Bernie Goetz case] becomes a through line to the present: the event that, against a backdrop of growing inequality and racial resentment in the early 1980s, first gave legal cover to white vigilantism, creating a template increasingly embraced on the right today."
—The New York Times
“Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury brings to life Bernhard Goetz’s shooting of four Black teenagers on a New York subway in 1984, a moment that exposed the ugly reality of America’s racial divide. With vivid prose and meticulous research, Thompson shows that we have yet to truly overcome the malign effects of racial animus.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth, and Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University
“A magnum opus that balances sensitive storytelling and fully realized characters with illuminating history—required reading for anyone interested in understanding the centrality of violence in American society.”
—Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
“Heather Ann Thompson has once again produced a defining work of American history with Fear and Fury. She provides not only a sweeping and indispensable account of Bernhard Goetz’s horrific actions but also excavates the larger backdrop of cultural and political forces that weaponized white rage during the 1980s and beyond. Readers will be moved by the care and dignity Thompson brings to the stories of Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—the four Black teenagers whose lives were forever changed during that fateful subway ride—forcing a reckoning with the human cost of vigilante violence. Fear and Fury is a monumental achievement that exposes the roots of the nation’s current crisis and serves as an urgent message to resist the manufactured fear that threatens the resilience of democracy itself.”
—Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire
"A gripping and powerful account of one of the 20th century’s most important criminal cases."
—James Forman Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own and J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School
“A comprehensive account of a vicious outburst that shook New York four decades ago. . . . [Thompson] elucidates how the incident still has a malign influence. . . . and excels when exploring the broader trends that led to the shooting and the 'throughline' connecting Goetz to 'the America of President Donald Trump'. . . . [Thompson’s] skill for historical dot-connecting makes this a worthy, informative book.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Thompson names Ronald Reagan’s cuts to the social safety net as the original sin of the 1980s. She charts the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which capitalized on racial resentments and economic anxieties of fearful, angry white New Yorkers who were disenchanted with liberal solutions to social problems. . . . But the heart of Fear and Fury is twin courtroom dramas: the criminal trial of Goetz for the shootings and a civil trial seeking financial damages for one of his victims. . . . In Thompson’s capable hands, the Goetz saga, and its relationship to the present day, gets the messy resolution it deserves.”
—BookPage, starred review
"A true story of injustice—in which Goetz got off unscathed while the teens paid for the rest of their lives—against a background of economic inequality accelerated by Republican economic and social policies, racial animosity and vigilante adulation fanned by Murdoch’s divisive media empire, and the NRA’s burgeoning political muscle. . . . Insightful. . . . Convincing."
—Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.
Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans
by Steven Belletto
Bloomsbury Academic, 2025
Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “poem-life.” Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work.
The proportions of Ted Joans's life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his “jazz action” paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim. But at the height of his success, Joans left the States for Europe and Africa, and set up bases of operation in places such as Paris, Copenhagen, Tangier, and Timbuktu. He would spend the subsequent decades in constant movement around the globe, an itinerant poet, interdisciplinary artist, and self-styled “Surrealist griot” who was especially attuned to the magnetic power of chance encounters. He published some 40 books and booklets, and wrote much more that is still unpublished, including novels, autobiographies, and a comprehensive guide to Africa-all the while cultivating what he thought of as his greatest artwork, his own “poem-life."
Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans's vast body of unpublished-and previously-unseen-work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power, among them, while always remaining a true original. Ted Joans's poem-life and body of work are unlike any other in the 20th Century, and Black Surrealist, illustrated with over 70 images, many never before published, is the first book to reckon with this singularly important poet-artist, and to show how and why his creative spirit lives on.
REVIEWS:
“Black Surrealist is the product of prodigious research. It offers 60 pages of footnotes, a 15-page bibliography, an extensive index ... plenty more. The dozens of illustrations, photographs and pictures of archival material provide a context for Joans' wild life and untamed art ... The folks at Bloomsbury are certainly to be applauded for putting together an extraordinary book.” ―Rock and the Beat Generation
“Whether Belletto's biography triggers future interest from publishes in Joans's extant writing, it should advance our consideration of him as an avant-garde artist, and justifiably so. Regardless, without doubt he admirably lived his life as art. Finally, Belletto takes care to note that Blackness was front and center in Joans's work. Black experience as attitude and outlook encompassed all he pursued: jazz, painting, poetry, sex, and global travel.” ―Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Black Surrealist is pure light illuminating the long night of blues and beats, humor and hunger, freedom and flight, myth and memory, love and sex, art and improvisation that is the poetic life of Ted Joans. Steven Belletto plumbed the Marvelous and produced a magnificent tapestry depicting not only Joans's surrealist world but surrealism's Black world. Ted Lives! Dig?” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a fascinating and unconventional biography for an even more fascinating and unconventional artist. Expansive and thoroughly researched, this book will be a revelation for those of us who have known Joans primarily through his more widely available poetry collections and his most anthologized poems. Belletto may at times fall under the spell of his subject, but he nonetheless paints an engaging portrait in which we see Joans–the man of strong passions, politics, and contradictions, as well as the enigmatic, charismatic creator–with new clarity.” ―Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry
“Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a sorely needed critical biography of a poet and artist who made a profound impact on experimental movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from surrealism to the Black Arts Movement. Belletto's eminently readable biography deftly situates Joans in the artistic, political, and literary contexts in which he lived, traversing the three continents and eight decades of Joans's life. This study is especially well attuned to the plasticity of 'facts' in Joans's life, brilliantly illuminating the relentless work of critical fabulation through which Joans fashioned his life and art alike.” ―Jonathan P. Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies, The Pennylvania State University, USA
“One of the most significant books of Beat scholarship in recent years; Belletto's achievement in this biography will enlighten every serious reader of Beat literature.” ―Beat Scene
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020), No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is an Editor of Contemporary Literature.
The proportions of Ted Joans's life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his “jazz action” paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim. But at the height of his success, Joans left the States for Europe and Africa, and set up bases of operation in places such as Paris, Copenhagen, Tangier, and Timbuktu. He would spend the subsequent decades in constant movement around the globe, an itinerant poet, interdisciplinary artist, and self-styled “Surrealist griot” who was especially attuned to the magnetic power of chance encounters. He published some 40 books and booklets, and wrote much more that is still unpublished, including novels, autobiographies, and a comprehensive guide to Africa-all the while cultivating what he thought of as his greatest artwork, his own “poem-life."
Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans's vast body of unpublished-and previously-unseen-work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power, among them, while always remaining a true original. Ted Joans's poem-life and body of work are unlike any other in the 20th Century, and Black Surrealist, illustrated with over 70 images, many never before published, is the first book to reckon with this singularly important poet-artist, and to show how and why his creative spirit lives on.
REVIEWS:
“Black Surrealist is the product of prodigious research. It offers 60 pages of footnotes, a 15-page bibliography, an extensive index ... plenty more. The dozens of illustrations, photographs and pictures of archival material provide a context for Joans' wild life and untamed art ... The folks at Bloomsbury are certainly to be applauded for putting together an extraordinary book.” ―Rock and the Beat Generation
“Whether Belletto's biography triggers future interest from publishes in Joans's extant writing, it should advance our consideration of him as an avant-garde artist, and justifiably so. Regardless, without doubt he admirably lived his life as art. Finally, Belletto takes care to note that Blackness was front and center in Joans's work. Black experience as attitude and outlook encompassed all he pursued: jazz, painting, poetry, sex, and global travel.” ―Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Black Surrealist is pure light illuminating the long night of blues and beats, humor and hunger, freedom and flight, myth and memory, love and sex, art and improvisation that is the poetic life of Ted Joans. Steven Belletto plumbed the Marvelous and produced a magnificent tapestry depicting not only Joans's surrealist world but surrealism's Black world. Ted Lives! Dig?” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a fascinating and unconventional biography for an even more fascinating and unconventional artist. Expansive and thoroughly researched, this book will be a revelation for those of us who have known Joans primarily through his more widely available poetry collections and his most anthologized poems. Belletto may at times fall under the spell of his subject, but he nonetheless paints an engaging portrait in which we see Joans–the man of strong passions, politics, and contradictions, as well as the enigmatic, charismatic creator–with new clarity.” ―Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry
“Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a sorely needed critical biography of a poet and artist who made a profound impact on experimental movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from surrealism to the Black Arts Movement. Belletto's eminently readable biography deftly situates Joans in the artistic, political, and literary contexts in which he lived, traversing the three continents and eight decades of Joans's life. This study is especially well attuned to the plasticity of 'facts' in Joans's life, brilliantly illuminating the relentless work of critical fabulation through which Joans fashioned his life and art alike.” ―Jonathan P. Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies, The Pennylvania State University, USA
“One of the most significant books of Beat scholarship in recent years; Belletto's achievement in this biography will enlighten every serious reader of Beat literature.” ―Beat Scene
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020), No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is an Editor of Contemporary Literature.
The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home
by Wil Haygood
Knopf, 2026
[Publication date: February 10, 2026]
Award-winning author and journalist Wil Haygood explores how the Vietnam War became a mirror for the struggle of Black Americans—fighting for freedom abroad while demanding equality at home—and a powerful lens through which to understand the racial and political divides that continue to shape American life.
"With this book, Wil Haygood has become the preeminent chronicler of the Black experience in America.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Laureate for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
"In these masterful pages, Haygood reframes both the Vietnam War and the United States’ unfinished struggle for equality."—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La
Drawing on the lives of soldiers and officers, doctors and nurses, journalists and activists, artists and politicians, Haygood illuminates a generation caught between two battles: one on the front lines in Vietnam and another for justice and dignity in America.
Among those at the heart of the story are Air Force pilot Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese and a hero to millions back home; Dr. Elbert Nelson, a doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles and soon found himself amid rising Black soldier protests overseas; Wallace Terry, a groundbreaking Black reporter determined to expose the dynamics of race and war to the American public and Philippa Schuyler, a biracial concert pianist who traveled to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and died trying to bring them to safety.
Surrounding their experiences are the cultural and political forces of the era, including Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, and Lyndon Johnson, whose voices and actions shaped a decade of turbulence and transformation.
The War Within a War is both sweeping history and intimate revelation, capturing the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.
"With this book, Wil Haygood has become the preeminent chronicler of the Black experience in America.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Laureate for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
"In these masterful pages, Haygood reframes both the Vietnam War and the United States’ unfinished struggle for equality."—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La
Drawing on the lives of soldiers and officers, doctors and nurses, journalists and activists, artists and politicians, Haygood illuminates a generation caught between two battles: one on the front lines in Vietnam and another for justice and dignity in America.
Among those at the heart of the story are Air Force pilot Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese and a hero to millions back home; Dr. Elbert Nelson, a doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles and soon found himself amid rising Black soldier protests overseas; Wallace Terry, a groundbreaking Black reporter determined to expose the dynamics of race and war to the American public and Philippa Schuyler, a biracial concert pianist who traveled to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and died trying to bring them to safety.
Surrounding their experiences are the cultural and political forces of the era, including Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, and Lyndon Johnson, whose voices and actions shaped a decade of turbulence and transformation.
The War Within a War is both sweeping history and intimate revelation, capturing the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.
REVIEWS:
“…[A] clarifying and richly insightful Vietnam-era history. . . . Civil rights histories typically treat Vietnam as an external matter that came to the fore domestically when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned it on moral grounds in 1967. But “The War Within a War” conceives of Vietnam as a foreign theater of the rights struggle, in which concerns about inequality were magnified by the fact that Black soldiers were being asked to die for a country that discriminated against them in housing, employment and education. . . . Haygood’s earlier books, including biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., earned him a reputation as a temperate and perceptive social historian. He maintains his characteristic low-key tone as he explains why the full picture of Black Vietnam went unseen by most Americans: The white press corps was uninterested in questions of how race and racism were shaping the Blackest war in our national history.” —Brent Staples, The New York Times Book Review
"Haygood was born to be a writer but, what is more, he was born to be one of poets laureate of the Black experience in America. . . . It is, in its way, another biography, this time a biography of a time that changed America, American Blacks, and American whites in ways that are being recognized only now." —David Shribman, Columnist for the Globe and Mail in Canada; syndicated columnist in the US.
“A compelling book, the deep, moving story of how men and women of color experienced the war in Vietnam. With this book, Wil Haygood has become the preeminent chronicler of the Black experience in America.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Laureate for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
"In The War Within A War, Wil Haygood brings his signature blend of investigative rigor and narrative grace to the story of Black soldiers who fought courageously on two fronts – in the jungles of Vietnam and in a divided America. This is history written with heart, precision, and unflinching honesty. In these masterful pages, Haygood reframes both the Vietnam War and the United States’ unfinished struggle for equality." —Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La
"Wil Haygood writes with empathy and moral clarity, illuminating the lives of Black Americans whose experiences in Vietnam revealed the unfinished struggle for equality at home. The War Within a War is both history and reckoning, told with uncommon grace." —Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning, Devil in the Grove
"A searing history of the Black experience in Vietnam." —Kirkus Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
WIL HAYGOOD is the author of ten critically acclaimed nonfiction books, many of which have won literary awards. Haygood has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022 he received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio.
Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
by Ibram X. Kendi
One World, 2026
[Publication date: March 17, 2026]
The National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning charts how “great replacement theory” has become a dominant political idea of our time and ushered in an antidemocratic age.
“[Kendi] has a gift for tracing how historical ideas metastasize into present, real-world damage. . . . Kendi reveals the mechanics behind the myth, and why confronting it is now a democratic necessity.”—Oprah Daily
NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2026 by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, LitHub, Foreign Policy, The Millions
Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters across the globe—in Oslo, Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have expressed some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change.
The term was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” the White population. From there, politicians and theorists in the United States and elsewhere repackaged it as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and promoting diversity to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded those under threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India, all targeted with the message that they are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.
In Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.
REVIEWS:
“[Kendi] has a gift for tracing how historical ideas metastasize into present, real-world damage. . . . Kendi reveals the mechanics behind the myth, and why confronting it is now a democratic necessity.”—Oprah Daily
NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2026 by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, LitHub, Foreign Policy, The Millions
Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters across the globe—in Oslo, Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have expressed some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change.
The term was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” the White population. From there, politicians and theorists in the United States and elsewhere repackaged it as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and promoting diversity to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded those under threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India, all targeted with the message that they are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.
In Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.
REVIEWS:
Praise for Chain of Ideas:
“…Kendi narrows his scope to the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory and then broadens it by tracing the theory’s ties to authoritarianism worldwide.”—The New York Times
“As anti-immigrant sentiment soars around the world, Ibram X. Kendi, the National Book Award-winning historian of racism, charts the rise of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.”—Foreign Policy
“[Kendi] has a gift for tracing how historical ideas metastasize into present, real-world damage . . . Kendi reveals the mechanics behind the myth, and why confronting it is now a democratic necessity.”—Oprah Daily
“Sure to be bracing.”—Literary Hub
“The National Book Award winner tackles the ‘great replacement theory.’”—The Millions
“An exploration of the arguably premier racist trope of our time . . . A well-formed argument against the fashionably fascist thought that houses old wine in new skins.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A rousing call for solidarity across lines of class and race in order to fight fascism.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Praise for Stamped from the Beginning:
“[An] engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.”—The Washington Post
“Blending deep research and analysis with a powerfully intimate and personal voice, [Ibram X.] Kendi . . . grounds his argument in the present moment. . . . Brilliant, complicated and fascinating—Kendi renders this work of intellectual history as compelling as the juiciest biography.”—Los Angeles Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is a professor of history and the founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research enterprise examining global racism. He is the author of the National Book Award–winning Stamped from the Beginning and the international bestseller How to Be an Antiracist and has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.
An excerpt of the letter Ariana wrote from inside the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. She also wrote a wish list on New Year’s Eve, which included seeing her siblings and returning to her home in Hicksville, New York. Obtained by ProPublica
