This is a book that I’ve been vaguely aware of for a while–IRL Book Group are big fans of PRK, as he is known around these parts, in particular Empire of Pain. A few of my friends went to a talk he gave as well, which might have been focused on this work. Non-fiction isn’t my jam, and neither are murder/mystery/thriller type works. But boy oh boy did PRK jam together both of those things and create a work that is so much more than the […]

After reading Say Nothing, his account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe entered the vaunted “I will read anything this man puts out” territory for me. I read his books about the OxyContin crisis and Chinese immigration despite having no personal connection or any great interest in those subjects. So there was no question that I was going to pick up London Falling, even though I had no awareness of the story at the center of the book. Radden Keefe has set his sights […]

Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and OxyContin, are two of the greatest non-fiction books I’ve read. And while I had a keen interest in the subject matter of the former, I had no real connection to the topic of the latter. In the aftermath of so thoroughly enjoying Empire of Pain, I decided that I would read anything Patrick Radden Keefe wrote, no matter what it was about. That, of course, meant […]