I Read It So You Don’t Have To: ‘Empire Of Pain’
An award-winning journalist shows how the secretive family behind Purdue Pharma helped to create America’s opioid crisis
What did I read?
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
So who’s this Patrick Radden Keefe?
He’s a staff writer for The New Yorker, who builds in this book on his reporting on the Sacklers for that magazine. His honors include a National Book Critics Circle Award for his earlier Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
Give me the 30-second sell.
Empire of Pain is the latest book about the ravages of America’s opioid crisis, from Barry Meier’s 2003 Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death to Sam Quinones’ 2015 Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic and Chris McGreal’s 2018 American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts.
What sets Empire of Pain apart from those earlier books is that Keefe doesn’t focus on victims, their families, or others who’ve been extensively covered elsewhere. He zeroes in on the history and business practices of the secretive…
