Patrick Radden Keef Born in Boston in 1976, he is part of the team of The New Yorker and is the author of several books on non-fiction that mix the journalistic analysis, history and biography. There are already four published in Spain, because today the last one appears, Snake head, originally from 2009. The first was Do not say anything, then came The empire of pain and later on, Criminals. And it has made a name for itself on the best-seller lists of this genre.
He has also published articles in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The New York Review of Books. He has received several Awards and awards for his work and, in addition, he is the creator and narrator of the podcast in eight chapters Wind of Change. We take a look at those titles for anyone who wants to discover them.
Patrick Radden Keefe — books
Do not say anything
The first title published here was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orwell Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award.
It narrates the events that took place in December 1972, when several hooded men kidnapped Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old widow with ten children in her care. It was in a Catholic neighborhood of Belfast and there was no doubt that it was a retaliation from the IRABut the crime did not begin to be solved until 2003, five years after the peace accords. Good Friday, when they unearthed the mortal remains of McConville on a lonely beach.
Radden Keefe began to investigate the ramifications of the case, but he didn't yet know that he was going to write a Complete chronicle of the Northern Ireland conflict which has been unanimously acclaimed. He interviewed and obtained testimonies never before collected, and made a portrait of the professionalization of the republican militias, the repression of the British State, the escalation of violence and, above all, the ideological evolution of some of its protagonists, such as Pains Price, who joined the IRA at a very young age and was involved in, among other attacks, the execution of McConville.
The empire of pain
This title starts at the Great Depression, with the story of three brothers dedicated to medicine: Raymond, Mortimer and Arthur Sackler, who had a special gift for advertising and marketing. Years later he contributed to the family's first fortune by devising the commercial strategy for a revolutionary tranquilizer, Valium, for the big pharmaceutical company that brought it to market. Later it was his nephew Richard Sackler, Raymond's son, took over the family business, including Purdue Pharma, his own drug manufacturing company. He took over from his uncle Arthur and launched a drug that was to be definitive, OxyContinThey made billions of dollars, but it would end up ruining their reputation.
Radden Keefe set out to investigate what was behind the sackler dynasty in 2017, since its complicated relationships relatives, where the money came from or their dubious practices market. The result is this analysis that recounts the rise and fall of one of the great American families and its more than dark emporium of health.
Criminals
In this third book, Radden Keefe takes a broad tour again of the grayer side of human beings. Now he dedicates himself to portraying, among other characters, the Arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, Chapo Guzman and his life after his escape from a high-security prison, or the famous Dutch criminal William Holleeder and his own sister's efforts to get him put in prison. In total, they are twelve profiles of swindlers, rogues, murderers and rebels, whose lives and careers invite reflect on evil, power, crime and corruption, but also about the courage of those who decided to confront them.
Snake head
We end this review of Patrick Radden Keefe's books with this title that touches on the subject of human trafficking. The first of the plots of this story takes us to the incredible journey of Golden Venture, the ship that ran aground on the Rockaway Peninsula near New York on June 6, 1993, loaded with More than three hundred undocumented Chinese immigrants and was broadcast live.
The mind behind that event was unusual: a middle-aged, completely nondescript woman named Cheng Chui Ping that, from the back room of a remote bazaar in Chinatown, had been slowly building a multi-million dollar empire. Sister Ping, as she was called, was the eldest «snake head» from the United States, someone capable of organizing the passage of thousands of compatriots in exchange for small fortunes.
Other subplots tell us the wars between different gangs (among which the Fuk Ching stood out), the black money circuits towards the province of Fujian, some internal failures of American organizations that monitor the borders, or the FBI investigating other "snakeheads" and their futile efforts to stop them.