Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
Patrick Radden Keefe
Picador
Rogues is a collection of Patrick Radden Keefe’s long-form journalism from The New Yorker. These are not pieces you find in a daily newspaper but longer and deeper investigative articles, written for serious magazines. Popular wisdom says the internet has killed magazines, but as Keefe points out in his preface, it has given a new lease of life to long-form writing which, he says, is just a click away.
Here he has collected 12 pieces from the past dozen or so years looking at a selection of rogues — some scoundrels, others hard-core nasty. The sections range from travelling with food and travel celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and investigating a collector who said 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, killing three.
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 aim was to prevent him receiving the death penalty. And when Keefe delves into the intricacies of insider trading, he writes with immense clarity, probes the motivation of the traders and makes his hunt for answers riveting.
He often leaves it to readers to make up their own minds about his subjects. 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.
Rogues is not a book to read from cover to cover: take it one article at a time as they are thought-provoking and invite further research. But it is a fascinating book and a celebration of proper journalism.
A collection of rogues — from likeable scoundrels to hard-core nasty
Thought-provoking articles that invite further research
Image: Supplied
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
Patrick Radden Keefe
Picador
Rogues is a collection of Patrick Radden Keefe’s long-form journalism from The New Yorker. These are not pieces you find in a daily newspaper but longer and deeper investigative articles, written for serious magazines. Popular wisdom says the internet has killed magazines, but as Keefe points out in his preface, it has given a new lease of life to long-form writing which, he says, is just a click away.
Here he has collected 12 pieces from the past dozen or so years looking at a selection of rogues — some scoundrels, others hard-core nasty. The sections range from travelling with food and travel celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and investigating a collector who said 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, killing three.
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 aim was to prevent him receiving the death penalty. And when Keefe delves into the intricacies of insider trading, he writes with immense clarity, probes the motivation of the traders and makes his hunt for answers riveting.
He often leaves it to readers to make up their own minds about his subjects. 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.
Rogues is not a book to read from cover to cover: take it one article at a time as they are thought-provoking and invite further research. But it is a fascinating book and a celebration of proper journalism.
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