Empire Of Pain (the Secret History Of The Sackler Dynasty)

By (author) Keefe, Patrick Radden
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The story of the Sackler dynasty, their company Purdue Pharma, its bestselling drug OxyContin, their immensely generous philanthropy and their involvement in the opioid crisis that has created millions of addicts, even as it generated billions of dollars in profit.
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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Now on BBC Radio 4 ''Book of the Week''
Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021
Shortlisted for the Crime Writers'' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis.

''One of those authors I will always read, no matter what the subject matter, which is why I gobbled up Empire of Pain . . . a masterclass in compelling narrative nonfiction.'' – Elizabeth Day, The Guardian ''30 Best Summer Reads''

‘You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much’ – The Times

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. 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 host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.

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There are so many "they did what?" moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the page
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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.
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The story of the Sacklers and OxyContin is a parable of the modern era of philanthropy being deployed to burnish the reputations of financiers and entrepreneurs . . . [A] tour-de-force
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Explosive . . . Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial precision . . . Keefe is a gifted storyteller who excels at capturing personalities.