Empire of Pain
- Author Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrator Patrick Radden Keefe
- Publisher Pan Macmillan
- Run Time 18 hours and 6 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Biography: business and industry, Biography: science, technology and medicine, Business and Management, Business ethics and social responsibility, Chemical, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, Corporate crime / white-collar crime, Health, illness and addiction: social aspects, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, Society and Social Sciences, True crime, True stories of survival of abuse and injustice.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
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Price p/Title
- £7.99
- £6.99
- £5.99
- £4.99
- £3.99
Listen to a sample
What to expect
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. The inspiration behind the Netflix series Painkiller, starring Uzo Aduba and Matthew Broderick. Read by the author, Patrick Radden Keefe.
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'
Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books
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.
‘You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much’ – The Times
Critics Review
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There are so many “they did what?” moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the page
Sunday 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-force
Financial Times -
Put simply, this book will make your blood boil . . . a devastating portrait of a family consumed by greed and unwilling to take the slightest responsibility or show the least sympathy for what it wrought . . . a highly readable and disturbing narrative.
New York Times Book Review -
An engrossing (and frequently enraging) tale of striving, secrecy and self-delusion . . . Even when detailing the most sordid episodes, Keefe’s narrative voice is calm and admirably restrained, allowing his prodigious reporting to speak for itself. His portrait of the family is all the more damning for its stark lucidity.
New York Times -
A true tragedy in multiple acts. It is the story of a family that lost its moorings and its morals . . . Written with novelistic family-dynasty and family-dynamic sweep, Empire of Pain is a pharmaceutical Forsythe Saga, a book that in its way is addictive, with a page-turning forward momentum.
Boston Globe
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