Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - 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

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, known for their lavish donations to 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 a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.

Empire of Pain begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm.

Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury.

Forty years later, Raymond's son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium--co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug's addictiveness--was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die.

This 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. 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.

Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America's second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world's great fortunes.

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. He is also an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the New America Foundation. His work has also featured in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books, and he is a regular guest on NPR, the BBC, and MSNBC. Patrick won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014 for his story A Loaded Gun, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is a Guggenheim Fellow.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385545686
ISBN 10	0385545681
Title	Empire of Pain
Author	Patrick Radden Keefe
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2021-04-13
Number of pages	560
Prizes	Winner of The Baillie Gifford Prize 2021, Short-listed for Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2021, Short-listed for J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize 2022, Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Awards 2021, Long-listed for PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction 2022
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.