One Saturday afternoon in December 1984, a man got onto the number 2 train going downtown at West 14th Street in Greenwich Village. Blond, glasses-wearing, and scrawny, he did not fit anyone’s stereotype of a dangerous man. But he was carrying, under his wais…

Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New Yorks Explosive 80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation
Penguin Press, 384 pp., $32.00
Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Ber…