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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Patrick Radden Keefe
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Description for Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Paperback.
The shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis. The inspiration behind the Netflix series Painkiller, starring Uzo Aduba and Matthew Broderick.
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
The Sunday Times Bestseller
A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'
Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year
Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
'I gobbled up Empire of Pain . . . a masterclass in ... Read morecompelling narrative nonfiction.' – Elizabeth Day, The Guardian '30 Best Summer Reads'
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions like Harvard and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin. A blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and author of Say Nothing (now streaming on Disney+), Patrick Radden Keefe, exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty, and twenty-first-century greed.
'There are so many "they did what?" moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the page' – Sunday Times
‘You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much’ – The Times
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Say Nothing: Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (now streaming on Disney+), as well as two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He is the ... Read morewriter and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change on the origins of the Scorpions’ power ballad. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York. Show Less
Reviews for Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
There are so many "they did what?" moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the page
Sunday Times
This is no dense medical tome, but a page-turner with a villainous family to rival the Roys in Succession, and one where every chapter ends with the perfect bombshell.
Esquire
The story of the Sacklers and ... Read moreOxyContin is a parable of the modern era of philanthropy being deployed to burnish the reputations of financiers and entrepreneurs . . . [A] tour-de-force
Financial Times
Put simply, this book will make your blood boil . . . a devastating portrait of a family consumed by greed and unwilling to take the slightest responsibility or show the least sympathy for what it wrought . . . a highly readable and disturbing narrative.
John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood
New York Times Book Review
An engrossing (and frequently enraging) tale of striving, secrecy and self-delusion . . . Even when detailing the most sordid episodes, Keefe’s narrative voice is calm and admirably restrained, allowing his prodigious reporting to speak for itself. His portrait of the family is all the more damning for its stark lucidity.
Jennifer Szalai
New York Times
A true tragedy in multiple acts. It is the story of a family that lost its moorings and its morals . . . Written with novelistic family-dynasty and family-dynamic sweep, Empire of Pain is a pharmaceutical Forsythe Saga, a book that in its way is addictive, with a page-turning forward momentum.
David M. Shribman
Boston Globe
Explosive . . . Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial precision . . . Keefe is a gifted storyteller who excels at capturing personalities.
Washington Post
An air-tight indictment of the family behind the opioid crisis . . . [an] impressive exposé
Harriet Ryan
Los Angeles Times
A damning portrait of the Sacklers, the billionaire clan behind the OxyContin epidemic . . . [Keefe] has a knack for crafting lucid, readable descriptions of the sort of arcane business arrangements the Sacklers favored.
Laura Miller
Slate
Keefe has a way of making the inaccessible incredibly digestible, of morphing complex stories into page-turning thrillers, and he's done it again with Empire of Pain . . . equal parts juicy society gossip and historical record.
Seija Rankin
Entertainment Weekly
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