Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Name: Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Rating: 4.561507936507937 (252 reviews)
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
ISBN: 9781529063103

by Patrick Radden Keefe

4.6

(252 ratings)

560 pages13 editions2022Pan MacmillanISBN 9781529063103

Biography

About this book

The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing. 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 to the arts and 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. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Publication Details

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2022
Pages: 560
ISBN: 9781529063103
Language: en
Editions: 13

About Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, as well as two other books: The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, and Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. He started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and has written articles about the chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain, the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman, the tragic personal history of the mass shooter Amy Bishop, and the role that the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma played in sparking the opioid crisis. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016. Say Nothing received the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2019 and was named one of Literary Hub’s “20 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade.” Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a JD from Yale Law School. In addition to The New Yorker, his work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Photograph by Philip Montgomery ([source](https://www.patrickraddenkeefe.com/bio-new))