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INTERVIEW: PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Patrick Radden Keefe
Philip Montgomery
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of three books, including Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book is Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Doubleday, April 13), which our reviewer called a “definitive, damning, urgent tale of overweening avarice at tremendous cost to society.” Keefe answered some questions by email.
A lot of excellent books have been written about the opioid epidemic. Why did you want to write about the Sackler family? It was through some of those terrific books that I first learned about the role the family played in the opioid crisis. But I wanted to write a different sort of story—not a full spectrum account of the opioid epidemic but a multigenerational saga about the rise and fall of one family, tracing the roots of the Sackler dynasty from the early days in Depressionera Brooklyn to the bitter legal endgame of recent years. It’s a book about the dark secrets behind a great American fortune, about philanthropy and greed and the profound mark that this family left on our world.
Empire of Pain is in many ways a very different book from your last one, Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Was there anything similar about the process of reporting and writing them, though? On the surface, the books seem very different, but there are thematic similarities: Both books are interested in secrets and denial and the deceptive stories that people tell themselves and others in an effort to justify their own actions. And my process tends to be the same from project to project: intensive archival work and interviews, then a lot of effort to take all that research and distill it into a literary narrative that, if I’m doing it right, has real depth and momentum.
What was it like having a book come out in 2021? How did you connect with readers in this socially distanced year? It was very strange! I had released a podcast at the outset of the pandemic, so I had some experience with the weird world of promoting something via Zoom. But after a couple of years working mostly in solitude on the book, sitting at my desk, staring at my computer, it was surreal to find that the “book tour” would entail…sitting at my desk, staring at my computer. Like winning a pie-eating contest in which the grand prize is more pie. But I was grateful for the opportunity to connect with readers, even remotely, and hugely encouraged by the warm reception to the book.
Who is the ideal reader for this book, and what do you hope they take away from it? One thing I remind myself of a lot when I’m writing is that I’m not writing for specialists. I’m not
writing for the person who has already read a dozen books on this topic, or even for people who start with any particular interest in the ostensible subject of the book. Character and narrative can create a wonderful undertow that pulls the reader into worlds that she might never otherwise have entered, so, whether I’m writing about the Troubles in the 1970s or the opioid crisis today, my hope is to engage any reader who happens to pick up the book and read a few pages.
What work of nonfiction most dazzled you this year? It came out at the very end of last year, but one of the most dazzling and original nonfiction books I’ve read in years is Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West by Lauren Redniss.
Interview by Tom Beer.
that Georgia is at the crux of the 2020 presidential election and that Stacey Abrams’ get-out-the-vote campaign brought in hundreds of thousands of voters to turn the state blue, Blow considers the state “proof of concept” that Black voters can indeed sway elections. He adds that the entire South could follow suit if only Blacks would reverse the path of the Great Migration to the North during Jim Crow and remake the electoral map by forming a solid majority. As he writes, if just half of Black residents elsewhere moved South, it would establish that majority from Louisiana all the way across the Southern heartland to South Carolina, “a contiguous band of Black power that would upend America’s political calculus and exponentially increase Black political influence.” It would also end White supremacy in that intransigent region. “The South now beckons as the North once did,” he urges in his resounding conclusion. “The promise of real power is made manifest. Seize it. Migrate. Move.”
Valuable as a thought experiment alone but also an “actual plan” for effecting lasting political change.
THE SHATTERING America in the 1960s
Boyle, Kevin Norton (464 pp.) $40.00 | Oct. 26, 2021 978-0-393-35599-4
A concise, beautifully written history of the “long” 1960s, bringing the most important events and developments of that tumultuous decade to vivid life. Boyle, who won the National Book Award for Arc of Justice (2004), aims his latest at general readers intrigued by this pivotal period of U.S. history. However, it’s likely that those most affected by the text will be those who lived through the period; the author delivers a potent reminder of the unremitting, searing crises of those years. Assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate crisis are only the most significant. Other incidents and cultural changes weren’t far behind in impact: Woodstock, experimentations in drugs and sex, sit-ins and teach-ins, protest marches, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws, the 1968 Democratic Convention, Roe v. Wade, the Pentagon Papers, etc. Boyle slights no major figures— Lyndon Johnson, Abbie Hoffman, the Beatles, Tom Hayden, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon get their due—while bringing in many lesser-known ones. Admitting to necessary selectivity, the author has to pass over many issues then just coming to prominence, including Latino and Native rights, the women’s movement, and the emerging environmental crisis. Boyle convincingly, if too subtly, contends that the “old order,” though undoubtedly under immense pressure from the outside, also “cracked from within.” Boyle is skilled at setting events in their particular context, although occasionally, as in the throat-clearing opening 60 pages on the years before 1960, he overdoes it. What makes the book particularly effective is the author’s inclusion of the lives and situations of ordinary Americans; Boyle’s memorable character sketches capture the
punch me up to the gods
hard realities and significant changes that occurred during that time. The author is also commendably balanced in his assessments; it’s difficult to discern his partialities. Ultimately, this is a standout example of narrative analytical history.
A brilliantly achieved history of some unusually fraught years of American history.
LINER NOTES FOR THE REVOLUTION The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Brooks, Daphne A. Belknap/Harvard Univ. (608 pp.) $39.95 | Feb. 23, 2021 978-0-674-05281-9
A spirited study of how Black women musicians and writers have informed each other despite gatekeepers’ neglect and
dismissals.
Brooks, a professor of African American Studies at Yale, ranges from early blues icons like Bessie Smith, who created “jams that revel in the complexities—the affective ambiguities— of a Black woman’s inner lifeworld,” through contemporary phenoms like Janelle Monáe and Beyoncé. But it’s not all about the musicians. Women writers on Black music—Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, blues and jazz historian Rosetta Reitz—are crucial to Brooks, but this book is not strictly about music writing, either. By synthesizing both groups, the author develops an engrossing and provocative secret history of Black artists developing their own modes of history and celebration, exploring “the myriad ways that Black women have labored in and through sonic culture.” Hurston, an anthropologist before she was a celebrated novelist, made the case for blues music as central to American life; Hansberry’s defense of her own work and Black culture in general established a model for future writers; blues duo Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas opened up questions of Black (and perhaps queer) defiance of expectations to this day and how history is often warped by self-declared White keepers of blues history. The supporters for Brooks’ thesis aren’t exclusively Black; she writes rhapsodically about music critics Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, and Reitz, who reissued the work of Black blueswomen. However, the author emphasizes a culture in which “Black women are rarely in control of their own archives, rarely seen as skilled critics or archivists, all too rarely beheld as makers of rare sounds deemed deserving of excavation and long study.” Brooks writes with a scholar’s comprehensiveness, only occasionally overly fussy and digressive; her record-geek’s enthusiasm is explicit, and her book is a powerful corrective.
A sui generis and essential work on Black music culture destined to launch future investigations.
PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS A Memoir
Broome, Brian Mariner Books (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 18, 2021 978-0-358-43910-3
An engrossing memoir about growing up Black and gay and finding a place in the world. Structured around Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool,” Broome’s thought-provoking, emotional journey unfolds through a clever use of parallel stories and juxtaposition. Writing about an experience at a bus stop on “the Black end of town,” where he watched a father berate his toddler son for crying, the author addresses his own upbringing with an abusive father whose “beatings were like lightning strikes. Powerful, fast, and unpredictable. He held his anger so tightly that, when it finally overtook him, the force was bone-shaking. He punched me like I was a grown-ass man.” As a dark-skinned Black boy in Ohio, Broome’s childhood was fraught with peril; at school, it was made abundantly clear that God “made white people and Black people and meant for us to stick to our own kind.” His parents used shame and abuse to try and toughen him up, tactics the author describes in heart-wrenching detail. While watching the man on the bus, he realized that “what I am witnessing, is the playing out of one of the very conditions that have dogged my entire existence. This ‘being a man’ to the exclusion of all other things.” Moving back and forth through time, Broome revisits similar scenes—e.g., punishment and rejection for not acting according to someone’s expectations, halting attempts to express himself— and he interrogates his complicated relationship with his parents. In one particularly poignant passage, the author describes how he convinced his mother to buy him a girl’s shirt at the store: “And from that day to this one, no one has ever looked at me like my mother did that day. It was pity mixed with worry for what was to come. It was the piping pink manifestation of all she had ever suspected.” Beautifully written, this examination of what it means to be Black and gay in America is a must-read.
A stellar debut memoir.
ROCK ME ON THE WATER 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
Brownstein, Ronald Harper/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $29.99 | March 23, 2021 978-0-06-289921-7
Atlantic senior editor Brownstein recounts the annus mirabilis that produced some of the most memorable songs, films, and TV shows in pop-culture history.
In a book that neatly brackets William McKeen’s Everybody Had an Ocean (2017), Brownstein conjures up the Los Angeles of 1974. It was a time of endless possibility, marked by countless highlights: Chinatown, Linda Ronstadt’s album Heart Like a Wheel, the completion of the first draft of the screenplay that would give birth to the Star Wars franchise, and the political rise of former seminarian Jerry Brown. In TV, Norman Lear had cornered the market on socially conscious, sometimes controversial comedy, as when the lead character of Maude got pregnant at age 47 and got an abortion. “Though the city was not yet the liberal political bastion it would grow into,” writes the author, “Los Angeles emerged as the capital of cultural opposition to Nixon.” Some of this opposition was seemingly innocent: The Mary Tyler Moore Show was funny, but it advanced the thesis that women could work, live single lives, and be happy while Jackson Browne proved himself a pioneer of painful self-introspection. But that innocence is illusory. As Brownstein writes, 1974 also saw a tidal wave of cocaine wash over LA, the favorite party appetizer of the film set, the music crowd, and celebrities alike. Brownstein also takes in a wide swath of the world outside LA, from the denouement of the Patty Hearst kidnapping to the emergence of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda as a political power couple. There’s some nice dish, too, as when Carroll O’Connor demanded artistic control of All in the Family because the Jewish writers wouldn’t understand the mind of a working-class Christian; and shrewd cultural analysis, as when Brownstein chronicles the transition by Browne and his contemporaries “from celebrating the freedom that revolution unlocked to tabulating its cost in impermanence and instability.”
An endlessly engaging cultural history that will resonate with anyone alive in 1974.
JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF REASON The Life of Kurt Gödel
Budiansky, Stephen Norton (384 pp.) $30.00 | May 11, 2021 978-1-324-00544-5
One of the great geniuses of the 20th century, barely known outside academia today, receives a much-needed expert biographical treatment.
Regarding his subject, Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), Budiansky writes, “Einstein had called him ‘the greatest logician since Aristotle,’ and even in Princeton, that town with more Nobel Prize winners than traffic lights, his otherworldly genius had stood out.” Born to a prosperous family in Austria-Hungary, Gödel was brilliant from the start. He entered the University of Vienna in 1924 to study physics but became attracted to mathematics and philosophy. During the 1920s, Vienna was a world center for both disciplines, and Gödel’s talents were quickly recognized. Many readers are unaware that nothing in science is proven. The law of gravity states that things fall down only because things always fall down. No proof exists that they can’t fall up. Only mathematics produces absolute proofs. Mathematicians find this deeply satisfying, but they are still recovering from the shock of Gödel’s great discovery, in the early 1930s, that many systems in mathematics, while true, can’t be proven. Although a historic milestone, it’s an exceedingly difficult concept; readers with some background in college mathematics will be best-suited to comprehending the author’s explanations. Fortunately, Budiansky writes so well that this is no problem. Although Gödel remains the focus of this terrific book, the author delivers insightful portraits of a score of brilliant men and women, almost all German or Austrian, descriptions of their work and academic struggles in early-20th-century Europe, and their lives after Hitler destroyed German science. Many moved to the U.S., where they encountered a land of Eden, especially Princeton, “a picturesque pre-Revolutionary village attached to the university campus.” Barely escaping Vienna in 1940, Gödel settled at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, became a close friend of Einstein, and continued groundbreaking work despite increasing periods of obsession and paranoid delusion, which eventually led to his death via slow starvation.
An outstanding biography of a man of incomprehensible brilliance.
UNBOUND My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
Burke, Tarana Flatiron Books (320 pp.) $28.99 | Sept. 14, 2021 978-1-250-62173-3
A soul-baring memoir by one the most significant social activists of the past two decades.
By the time the #MeToo hashtag became popularized in 2017, Burke had been at work for more than 10 years building the “me too” movement. Though she sets the record straight as the movement’s true founder, she’s less concerned about credit than she is about letting “women, particularly young women of color, know that they are not alone—it’s a movement. It’s beyond a hashtag. It’s the start of a larger conversation and a movement for radical community healing.” With empathy at the heart of this movement, Burke offers her own story as a means of helping others. “A dark-skinned Black girl who had been damaged and used,” the author recounts her upbringing in the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s where she was labeled “ugly” and blamed herself for the rape she endured at age 7. Through searing prose and riveting storytelling, Burke lays her trauma bare alongside beautifully rendered moments, such as her discovery, as a high school freshman, of the transformative power of fellow survivor Maya Angelou’s life and art. An honors student known as the “Black Power girl” who challenged racist White teachers, the author went on to become a college activist and then a community organizer in Selma, Alabama. Her intense
