Empire of Pain
Patrick Radden Keefe
2021 Winner
Baillie Gifford Prize
2021 Nominee
Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year
Synopsis
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.
‘Jaw-dropping . . . Beggars belief’ – Sunday Times
‘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.
There are so many "they did what?" moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the pageSunday 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 OxyContin is a parable of the modern era of philanthropy being deployed to burnish the reputations of financiers and entrepreneurs . . . [A] tour-de-forceFinancial Times