Book Review - Rogues - Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe is so good at creating what’s called the ‘writearound’ - which is when he creates an article about subject who doesn’t grant an interview - that he gets an offer to ghostwrite the biography of ‘El Chapo’, the notorious Mexican drug lord. He considers it for a brief moment (imagine that book) before he respectfully declines, but it’s a tribute to his writing ability to capture portraits of this bunch of grifters, killlers, rebels and crooks in ‘rogues’.
And what a cast it is. From computer technicians who expose wide scale financial scandals, to International arms traffickers, a death penalty attorney who feels deeply for her clients and the apprentice creator who transformed the fortunes of Donald Trump, these pieces are incredibly readable and revealing.
Long Form
Radden Keefe excels in these ‘long form’ pieces, and as he says in the preface, they are ‘Substantial enough to completely immerse yourself in but short enough to finish in a sitting’ and that’s how I consumed them. If I started one, I was finishing it. He’s inspired by those magazine pieces (all of the included pieces featured first in The New Yorker) that seem like a thing of the past in this age of truncated attention spans but there’s definitely still a place for them, as this book shows.
I first came across Patrick Radden Keefe in the superb ‘Say Nothing’ a work of non-fiction that tells the story of the troubles by focusing on a number of individuals. It reads at times like a thriller and I was blown away by the authors ability to focus on human details, and to take his immense research and mould it into a page turning narrative.
Highlights
It’s hard to pick out one favourite in ‘rogues’. I’m a fan of the late great Anthony Bourdain and though there’s been a slew of pieces recently, I found it to be a revealing portrait, especially as it’s one of the few times where he meets his subject. But a lot of the most interesting information comes from Radden writing around the subject, talking to the people who knew Bourdain to get a broader picture.
The background to the stories are also fascinating - I enjoyed the opener about international wine forgeries, and I was intrigued by the story of the Dutch gangster who was ‘betrayed’ by his own sister. Mark Burnett unleashes a monster in Donald trump, and the story of the Boston Bomber was thought provoking on the subject of the death penalty.
Research
There’s obviously a lot of research that goes into the making of these pieces in ‘rogues’ but they’re so well crafted and readable that it seems effortless. I learnt so much about mining contracts, arms smuggling, money laundering, international wine collectors - the topics are endlessly fascinating.
I was around halfway through this book when I ordered ‘Empire of Pain’, another much lauded book from Radden Keefe. I think more people have recommended that book to me than any other over the past couple of years. I’ve read some great non-fiction this year, as part of the 2022 Non-Fiction Challenge and his work is as good as I’ve read.
Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe
368 pages, Hardcover
June 28, 2022 by Doubleday Books