Perhaps "Rogues" is not a book to read
from cover to cover: rather take it one article at a time as the pieces are
thought-provoking, and often invite further research. But it is a fascinating
book, and a celebration of proper journalism. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer.
Courtesy of The Witness)
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks is a collection of Patrick Radden Keefe’s long-form journalism from the New Yorker. These are not the kind of pieces you find in a daily newspaper but much longer and deeper investigative articles, written for serious magazines. Popular wisdom says that the internet has killed magazines, but as Keefe points out in his preface, it has actually given a new lease of life to long-form writing which, as he says, is forever just a click away.
Here he has collected 12 pieces from the past dozen or so years looking a selection of rogues – some maybe merely roguish but others pretty hard-core nasty. The sections range from travelling with food and travel celebrity Anthony Bourdain and investigating a collector who claimed he had found a stash of wine collected by Thomas Jefferson in the 18th Century and sold it at auction for vast sums, to unravelling the capture of El Chapo, the infamous Mexican drug lord, and trying to understand the motivation of a neurobiologist who, in an academic faculty meeting pulled out a gun and shot six of her colleagues, three fatally. Not what academics expect to happen in a departmental get-together.
Keefe doesn’t always take the obvious line: in a piece on the Boston Marathon bomber, he concentrates on the defence lawyer, trying to understand what motivates her to defend a man who was obviously guilty – he was seen placing the bomb and made no effort to deny it. The lawyer’s main aim was to prevent him receiving the death penalty. And when Keefe gets into the intricacies of insider trading which are complicated for non-financial experts to understand, he writes with immense clarity, probes the motivation of the traders and makes his hunt for answers riveting.
Keefe often leaves it up to his readers to make up their own minds about the subjects of his writing. Even when he is unable to speak to those involved, because either they can’t or won’t speak to journalists, his research is exhaustive. Perhaps Rogues is not a book to read from cover to cover: rather take it one article at a time as the pieces are thought-provoking, and often invite further research. But it is a fascinating book, and a celebration of proper journalism. - Margaret von Klemperer
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks is published by Picador: ISBN 978-1-0350-0175-0
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