Empire of Pain
The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
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4.6 • 874 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing.
"A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate
The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned 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, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.
A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
America’s ongoing opioid epidemic can be traced back to not just one drug but to one unscrupulous family. In this riveting account, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing) describes how the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed the painkiller Oxycontin, using their massive power and influence to get the highly addictive drug overprescribed. With the sweeping drama of a novel, Keefe tells the Sackler brothers’ story from the beginning. He charms us with tales of their humble roots and early positive medical contributions—which makes their moral downfall all the more shocking. To illustrate the staggering scope of Oxycontin’s devastation, Keefe uses hard numbers and statistics—but also tragic real-life stories, like that of a New Jersey mother whose fatal overdose was discovered by her four-year-old son. The Oxycontin epidemic has always been heartbreaking. The rampant greed exposed in Empire of Pain makes it enraging.
Customer Reviews
Holy cow
I started it at 6:30 when I had my coffee and finished it at 10:30 the same night. I literally could not stop. From the first page it started out with a bang and then got even better. The twists just kept coming. Probably gonna read it again today.
Fascinating
Clearly denial is the most powerful force on earth. Sickening how evil the Sacklers are, but they had a lot of help along the way. I’m looking at you, FDA.
Excellent & Thorough Reportage of. The Perdue Pharma Devastattion
Keefe does a remarkable job in tracing the rise and inevitable collapse of the pharmaceutical giant Perdue Pharma and the rapacious Sackler dynasty who were completely oblivious to the damage they wrought garnering obscene profits along the wayI a must read!