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Patrick Radden Keefe

Biography

Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestsellers ROGUES, EMPIRE OF PAIN (winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize) and SAY NOTHING, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Twenty Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Book Review. His work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

He served as an Executive Producer on the award-winning FX series “Say Nothing,” based on his book. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast “Wind of Change,” about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Books by Patrick Radden Keefe

by Patrick Radden Keefe - Nonfiction, True Crime

In the early morning of November 29, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river. In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up, and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead. In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way did he seem suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son.

by Patrick Radden Keefe - Nonfiction, True Crime

ROGUES brings together a dozen of Patrick Radden Keefe’s most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. Here, he brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines if a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the “worst of the worst,” among other bravura works of literary journalism.

by Patrick Radden Keefe - Biography, Nonfiction, True Crime

The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions --- Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague --- until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. EMPIRE OF PAIN is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world. It chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

by Patrick Radden Keefe - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible, but no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress. Patrick Radden Keefe's book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, the consequences of which have never been reckoned with.