Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Patrick Radden Keefe…
Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and one of the most remarkable book authors I have ever encountered.
In addition to his superb reporting skills, which allow him to amass an impressive collection of useful data, he is also able to write heart-stopping prose. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
The former book was published in 2019 and I wrote about it here. The more recent book, Empire of Pain, similarly contained many examples of fine figurative language. Here are my favourite ones:
- The New York Headquarters of the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton occupy ten floors of a sleek black office tower that stands in a grove of skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan.
- If White was a master of muted power, Hanly was the opposite: he looked like a lawyer in a Dick Tracy cartoon.
- So, the Sackler Collection at Columbia just appeared in the world, as if by virgin birth, with few discernible links to the man who made it.
- A Yale-trained lawyer, he was a southern liberal and the sort of earnest do-gooder who can occasionally strike even his supporters as being a bit in love with his own virtue.
- Rorimer was a peculiar character. During the war, he had worked to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis and as director of the Met he would prowl the museum, like a cop on the beat, his flannel suit accented by combat boots.
- Poppies are naturally occurring. They spread their own seeds, scattering them as they swing in the wind, like a saltshaker.
- He was a hard worker, strong and handsome, a fastidious dresser, with a mustache and dark eyebrows, which accented his facial expressions, like punctuation marks.
- The steel mixer popped like a balloon, and scraps of metal and white-hot chemicals exploded in every direction.
- The tiny British overseas territory of Turks and Caicos is an archipelago of coral islands that lie scattered, like a handful of bread crumbs, across the opalescent waters between the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.
- The structure of their financial arrangements could seem deliberately obscure, with an infinity of anonymous corporate entities, all nested like Matryoshka dolls.
[Photo credit: Flickr. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]
