This is a brilliant book, it feels thorough and well researched, sticks to a fairly narrow path of looking at the Sackler family and their family business and how culpable they are for the opioid crisis in America (and beyond), and how they tried to gain immortality with their patronage of the arts. There is some karma when museums start to refuse their money and remove their names by the end of the book, but it doesn't feel like they really accept their guilt or that full justice is done for all the lives destroyed. So its an infuriating book too, the sheer levels of unnecessary greed. It could easily be quite a dry topic, but is an absolute page turner, like Succession with its endless dreadful people doing dreadful things. ( )

Great book, but so sad that the corruption caused so much pain. ( )

What a skill, to write so compellingly that you make me burn through a 600-page book like it’s a beach read. It is the exact opposite though and so infuriating at times that I had to walk away and breathe. There is a very special level of hell awaiting the Sackler family and I just wish I could see their faces when they arrive there. ( )

Empire of pain is an incredible deep dive into the origins of the opioid crisis and the family behind it going back decades. This book was engrossing, enlightening and tragic. ( )

Excellent investigation into the family behind OxyContin and the subsequent opioid epidemic. Patrick Radden Keefe is an excellent long form journalist and in this study of the Sackler family and their aggressive manufacture and marketing of a pain relief drug, Radden Keefe reports that he was sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of material he could gather. In most instances, court records from the multitude of challenges brought against Purdue Pharma. The owners vigorously denied their opioid OxyContin was addictive despite medical evidence showing otherwise. Using the family’s wealth to buy complicity from federal agencies, the legal and medical systems and employees and to buy immortality through philanthropy, the family come across as amoral megalomaniacs whose sole objective is greed.
More Americans died during the opioid epidemic than in the US’s foray into Vietnam.
Radden Keefe makes narrative non fiction so interesting.

2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge - Health ( )