Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade” by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.
New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year • One of
The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year • TIME Magazine 100
Must Read Books of 2021 • One the Best Books of the Year: NPR,
Slate, EW, Boston Globe, Goodreads, The Guardian, Town & Country,
BuzzFeed, LitHub, Vulture, and more
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and Finalist
for the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award
One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year
“An engrossing (and frequently enraging) tale of striving, secrecy
and self-delusion….Keefe nimbly guides us through the thicket of
family intrigues and betrayals… 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.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read
it. Every time he writes an article, I read it … he’s a national
treasure.” —Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show”
and author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Blowout
“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.” —David M. Shribman,
The Boston Globe
“A brutal, multigenerational treatment of the Sackler family… Keefe
deepens the narrative by tracing the family's ambitions and
ruthless methods back to the founding patriarch, Arthur Sackler…His
life might be a model for the American dream, if it hadn't arguably
laid the foundations for a still-unfolding national tragedy.”
—Brian Mann, NPR.org
“The opioid epidemic has killed nearly half a million Americans
over the past two decades. Many of their loved ones, along with
public health advocates and experts, believe that one very rich,
very famous family has never fully faced the consequences for its
role in those deaths. EMPIRE OF PAIN, the explosive new book by
journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, is an attempt to change that — to
hold the family accountable in a way that nobody has quite done
before, by telling its story as the saga of a dynasty driven by
arrogance, avarice and indifference to mass suffering…. Keefe
marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial
precision. Keefe is a gifted storyteller who excels at
capturing personalities.” —Jonathan Cohn, The Washington Post
"Keefe has a way of making the inaccessible incredibly digestible,
of morphing complex stories into page-turning thrillers, and he's
done it again with Empire of Pain…A scathing — but meticulously
reported — takedown of the extended family behind OxyContin, widely
believed to be at the root cause of our nation's opioid
crisis. It's equal parts juicy society gossip and historical
record of how they built their dynasty and eventually pushed Oxy
onto the market.” —Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly
“An air-tight indictment of the family behind the opioid
crisis….[an] impressive exposé.” —Harriet Ryan, The Los Angeles
Times
“A damning portrait of the Sacklers, the billionaire clan behind
the OxyContin epidemic. If you are someone who engages in this kind
of sneaky conduct, the last person you want reporting on you is
Keefe….[He] has a knack for crafting lucid, readable descriptions
of the sort of arcane business arrangements the Sacklers favored.
He is also indefatigable….The Sackler infighting described in
Empire of Pain will surely prompt many comparisons to the HBO
series Succession.” —Laura Miller, Slate
"One of the Ten Best Books of 2021"
– Laura Miller, Slate
“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.” —John
Carreyrou, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
“Rigorously reported and brilliantly executed Empire of
Pain hones in on the family whose company developed,
unleashed, and pushed the drug on Americans, pulling in billions of
dollars for themselves in the process….This is an important,
necessary book.” - Hillary Kelly, New York magazine
“A shocking saga… [a]tour-de-force account… [Keefe] brings to life
the obsessive personalities and ferocious energy of some
members…The Sacklers emerge as a shameless bunch, but Empire of
Pain also poses troubling questions about the US healthcare system
that permitted them to flourish.” —John Gapper, The Financial
Times
"Empire of Pain reads like a real-life thriller, a
page-turner, a deeply shocking dissection of avarice and calculated
callousness… It is the measure of great and fearless investigative
writing that it achieves retribution where the law could
not….Exhaustively researched and written with grace and
gravity, Empire of Pain unpeels a most terrible American
scandal. You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much."
—The Times (London)
"Indefatigable investigative journalist Keefe crafts a page-turning
corporate biography and jaw-dropping condemnation of the Sacklers’
amoral disregard for anything save the acquisition of power,
privilege, and influence. In Keefe’s expert hands, the Sackler
family saga becomes an enraging exposé of what happens
when utter devotion to the accumulation of wealth is paired
with an unscrupulous disregard for human health." — Carol
Haggas, Booklist
“An engrossing and deeply reported book about the Sackler family,
the owners of Purdue Pharma. Their company created Oxycontin,
the opioid introduced in the mid-90s that sent a wave of addiction
and death across the country. Unlike previous books on the
epidemic, Empire of Pain is focused on the wildly rich, ambitious
and cutthroat family that built its empire first on medical
advertising and later on painkillers. In his hands, their story
becomes a great American morality tale about unvarnished greed
dressed in ostentatious philanthropy.” —Time Magazine, The Best
Books of 2021 So Far
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