Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

Empire of Pain

• The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
• By: Patrick Radden Keefe
• Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
• Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
• Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, True Crime

Publisher's Summary

Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

A Barack Obama 2021 Summer reading list choice

Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of 21st-century greed.

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 Sackler family is one of the richest in the world, and their name adorns the walls of many famous institutions - Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. The source of the family fortune was vague, 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 that 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.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award