rogues true stories of grifters killers rebels and crooks review

It’s hard to pick out one favourite in ‘rogues’. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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’.Īnd what a cast it is. 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.

Rogues true stories of grifters killers rebels and crooks review