Rogues is a compilation of these half-remembered pieces - a quick Empire of Pain follow-up - and as entertaining and perplexing a publishing project as any other volume of collected journalism. That one about the fine wine fraud? Or about the Dutch gangster and his sister who turned against him? The El Chapo one? The one about the mass shooter who also happened to be a neurobiologist? Deeply disturbing, plainly told tales of everyday and extraordinary wickedness, crookedness and corruption - they’re all Keefe’s. In fact if you’ve read the New Yorker over the past decade or so - if you’re a rootless cosmopolitan, say, or a non-Manhattan-dweller of vaguely liberal inclinations who can nonetheless afford both private medical insurance and Condé Nast’s subscription rates - you’ll have come across Keefe’s features. An overnight sensation, it was years in the making. Let’s be honest, Patrick Radden Keefe is not one of them - or wasn’t, until the publication last year of Empire of Pain, his book about the Sackler family and America’s opioid epidemic, based on an old New Yorker article. White, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Anthony Lane and Malcolm Gladwell. The magazine has always had its stars, among them James Thurber, E.B. Roguesisn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel, a “best of” articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker.
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