Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
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Average rating4.7
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.
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Fascinating and heartbreaking and infuriating. Would be darkly funny at times if not for the terrible human cost this almost unimaginably callous and self-interested family inflicted on millions of innocent people.
I learned so much from this book and annoyed everyone around me because I couldn't stop talking about it. Radden Keefe continues to impress with his exhaustively researched and compellingly readable style. I barely knew anything about the Sackler family themselves (by their own design, I now know) but by the end, you will conclude, as Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, said to David & Kathe Sackler in Congressional testimony: “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I'm not aware of any family in America that is more evil than yours.”
What a fucking fantastic book. I literally couldn't put it down - I've just been reading it non-stop for hours on end. It meticulously traces the origins of the Sackler family, and how from the start, it was always about aggressively selling and advertising medication, without a single consideration for the consequences. Actually that's wrong, they did consider the consequences, and they decided they didn't care.
On par with Killers of the Flower Moon this year for best non-fiction I've read.
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