Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker.
Mr. Keefe is himself a witness: entering the narrative discreetly, attending court proceedings, poring over research materials, interviewing sources. His glimpses of people under stress are keen and often poignant, and his own discoveries can be profound ... Each of these stories could make a book in itself, not to mention an engrossing feature or documentary film ... [Keefe] does pay his unique subjects the compliment of his world-class attention, in works of deadline prose that shock, inform and entertain.
It's an excellent collection of Keefe's detective work, and a fine introduction to his illuminating writing ... It's a fascinating profile that showcases Keefe's ability to empathize with his subjects while still maintaining an appropriate level of journalistic skepticism. It also demonstrates Keefe's immense skill as a storyteller; like the other pieces in the book, it's compulsively readable, imbued with narrative tension that's never overwrought or melodramatic ... a wonderful book, not only because Keefe's prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that we're all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding ... This book is a joy to read.
At one point, when Keefe scrutinises a few thriller novels Bishop had written years ago for clues, you can’t help but admire a preternaturally attentive reporter at work. In another unforgettable moment, he gets Bishop to admit that in the months before she went on a shooting spree, she often broke out in hives worrying about her career prospects ... Keefe may travel the world over to unearth facts and investigate allegations, but his fidelity is strictly to the story; anything erratic gets left out. The genre has its formulaic flourishes and Keefe doesn’t always avoid them in this collection ... Then there is the nut graph that dutifully surfaces in the opening pages of every new piece, the story striving to impress on you its newsworthiness, which might have been necessary in the magazine version, but feels oppressive years later in a book. But the indiscriminate use of omniscient narration is perhaps the most infectious of Keefe’s offences ... These questions are exhaustively explored, but Keefe doesn’t provide any pat answers. He illuminates how in the end we sift through a bulky catalogue of evidence and settle for the most plausible story.
