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Top of the pile
94
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
98/100Critics
87/100Scholars
97/100Author:
Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher:
Doubleday
Date:
April 13, 2021
The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland returns with another tale of secrets, this time about the now-notorious family behind Valium and OxyContinâa multigenerational saga that begins at the turn of the century among hardscrabble immigrants in Brooklyn and dissolves in bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful.
What The Reviewers Say
Keefe nimbly guides us through the thicket of family intrigues and betrayals.
... masterfully damning.
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. We see the Sacklers moving from marketing to entrepreneurship to art collecting to philanthropy to ignominy. It is an American story, and an American tragedy—and travesty.
In Empire of Pain, Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial precision.
