all the real life heroes and villains you didn’t know you needed
all the real life heroes and villains you didn’t know you needed
the one where this blog turns into a Patrick Radden Keefe stan blog for a day
Hi friends,
There are very few authors that can make me stay up late reading. I like my beauty sleep very much and aim to get a solid 8 hours in every day, both because I like being well-rested and because I have a track record of spending money on stupid things I don’t need when I don’t get enough sleep. If you’re reading this blog, you probably know I like reading fiction. But Patrick Radden Keefe has caused me to stay up late during finals week in college, a distinction that not even the writers over at AO3 have managed.
Who is this guy, and why am I such a stan?
Keefe is an investigative journalist at the New Yorker who has written several books and a podcast about weird stuff that happens in real life. One thread I find connecting all his work is that he is spectacularly good at bringing in the human element into complex government/organized crime/drug cartel/weird celebrity machinations that he covers. El Chapo once asked him (through his lawyer) to ghostwrite his memoirs, which he declined. Hell, even Keefe’s relatively lighthearted profile on Anthony Bourdain does a 10/10 job of capturing the complexity of its subject.
The Greatest Hits
Winds of Change
This is the first time I’m giving a podcast a detailed section on this blog, but Winds of Change deserves all the press and the TV deal with Hulu it has gotten. Listening to each episode was one of the highlights of my pandemic lockdown experience—it’s best listened to with enough time in between episodes to build up suspense in my opinion.
To summarize, this podcast follows Keefe as he explores the Cold War-era story brought to him by a former CIA operative that has been a reliable source for his previous work covering the CIA that he once heard a story that the Scorpions’ (a West German rock band) song “Winds of Change” was somehow involved with the CIA’s Cold War propaganda attempts. Over eight episodes, Keefe explores every possibility and reveals a lot of fascinating tidbits from Cold War history about the CIA, while interviewing people ranging from music experts to former CIA agents. My brother, who hates podcasts normally, got super into it as well, no doubt thanks to all the twists and turns in their investigation.
The bonus episode, “The Love Song of Joanna Stingray,” is the incredible life story of Joanna Stingray, who was an American civilian involved with the rock music scene in the USSR, and why she legally changed her last name to Stingray. That episode alone is worth listening to the podcast for. Some things are stranger than fiction, kids.
Say Nothing
If you only read one nonfiction book this year, make it Say Nothing, which is about the Time of Troubles in Northern Ireland. If you’re an ignorant American like me who only had a rough idea of what went on since some kids from my high school hosted kids from Northern Ireland as part of an exchange program, Say Nothing is worth the read. This is the book that kept me up late at night during finals week. He does such a good job breaking down the conflict and its ripple effects in Northern Ireland today (that you can see political divides in the Amazon reviews themselves) that I don’t want to say more other than to read it.
Rogues
Why I have chosen to write this post now is because of Keefe’s new book Rogues, which is just many of his New Yorker articles over the years put together in one place. Many of his subjects refuse to talk to him, and it’s amazing how much he can figure out about a person without speaking to them directly. Beyond the El Chapo essay already mentioned, there are profiles on the producer of The Apprentice (who bizarrely came to the US as an illegal immigrant from Britain by walking out of LAX while on a layover to start a new job as a de facto mercenary in South America, becoming a nanny in Beverly Hills before marrying rich and divorcing as soon as he got a green card), a Dutch crime family torn apart from the inside, and a defense attorney who only defends those prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for some of the most heinous crimes a person can commit. Each of the articles is a gripping read, and since they were published over a 15-year span, some of them are probably new to you even if you’ve seen a few of them before.
Others:
(All by Patrick Radden Keefe!)
The Empire of Pain: A family history of three generations of the Sackler family, who are the main people to blame for America’s opioid epidemic. There are not many people who are truly, irredeemably evil in this world, but I consider the Sackler family among them.
The Snakehead: I unbelievably have not read this yet, but you can bet it’s high up my TBR. This is about Sister Ping, who was a very successful gangster and human smuggler in Chinatown, NYC in the 1980s and 1990s and was involved in bringing many Fujianese migrants looking for economic opportunity to New York.
This is the first time I’ve done a single author post on this blog. I bet I’ll do more in the future—when I find a writer I really vibe with, I’m the kind of reader who digs up everything they’ve ever written before I move on to the next writer.
See you soon,
tina