Title: Rogues
Rating: 4 Stars
I had really high hopes for this book. I like to read Patrick Radden Keefe. His discussion of the opioid crisis and the Sackler’s family role in it in Empire of Pain was masterful. Wrapping a true crime mystery around a history of the Irish Troubles in Say Nothing was amazing. So, seeing that this was a collection of long form articles about grifters, killers, and rebels sounded like it was going to be right up my alley.
This reminded me of David Grann. His set of profiles (The Devil & Sherlock Holmes) is possibly my favorite collection of long form journalism that I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. The two nonfiction books of his that I’ve read, The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, are both considered classics and either have been or are in the process of being made into films. Having said that, I was pretty much meh on those two. I think that he’s a stronger writer when it comes to the magazine sized long form pieces. Perhaps the shorter length narrows his focus.
With Keefe, since I really enjoyed his book length nonfiction, I thought that I would absolutely love his long form articles. I was even more excited when I saw the subjects of these articles. They include the drug lord El Chapo, the brother of a Lockerbie bombing victim obsessively trying to find the truth behind it, a mass shooter, the plot to bring an international arms dealer to justice, and the person behind The Apprentice that inadvertently served as the vehicle that ultimately led Donald Trump to the White House.
Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy reading them (after all, I did give the book 4 stars). It might have been unrealistic expectations, but I just didn’t feel as engaged with them as I did when I was reading a Grann long form article. With Grann’s articles, you’re so invested with them that there’s a page turning urgency when reading them.
The articles were interesting to read. They were fact filled. They were well written. I just didn’t feel pulled into them. They read to me like reporting. They were long versions of something that I’d find in a newspaper. Keefe is capable of more. I remember feeling viscerally angry while reading Empire of Pain and I was completely absorbed while reading Say Nothing.
Just to reiterate, they are interesting articles. The article about Judy Clarke was compelling. She’s a defense lawyer specializing in death penalty cases. She’s not one of those lawyers interested in getting DNA evidence introduced to exonerate an innocent man. No, her clients are all decidedly guilty of their crimes. The article focuses on her defense of Dzhokkar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. Seen on videotape planting the bomb (near a child, no less) and then later nearly dying in a police shootout, there is no question of his guilt. If you were to survey Americans, I’m pretty sure a clear majority would wish him dead. Despite that, Clarke passionately hates capital punishment and has spent her entire career fighting to save those that most people want dead. Trying to understand her is interesting reading.
Another article was about Amy Bishop. I’d never heard of her. She was a neurobiologist that had recently been denied tenure. At a department faculty meeting, she took out a gun and started shooting. Six people were shot and three were dead. Since the stereotype mass shooter is male, the fact that she was a woman makes her an interesting subject. The bombshell is later dropped that this wasn’t her first shooting. She’d apparently accidentally shot and killed her brother many years previously. Now the mystery deepens. What really happened with her brother? What is going on her head? We never find out.
The one article that completely pulled me in was on Anthony Bourdain. Published the year before he committed suicide, Keefe was seemingly able to get to the essence of Bourdain. His love of life and his seemingly desperate attempts to suck as much out of it as possible, while at the same time coming to grip with the fact that he was entering his 60s and having to look aging squarely in the face made the article seem to be almost a premonition for his ultimate suicide.
If long form journalism is your thing, then if you haven’t, you really should check out Grann’s collection. Rogues does not measure up to that level of excellence but the subjects that it covers make it worthwhile to read.
dorkenstein 