Empire of Pain
Patrick Radden Keefe spent years on the reporting that became Empire of Pain, the definitive history of the Sackler family and their role in the American opioid crisis. The book moves across three generations, from the immigrant brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, who built fortunes in 1950s pharmaceutical advertising and bought respectability through museum wings around the world, to the second generation that founded Purdue Pharma, and to the grandchildren who are still fighting in court over how much they owe. Keefe traces the launch of OxyContin in 1996, the deliberately misleading marketing of its abuse potential, and the avalanche of overdose deaths that followed. The result is corporate biography as moral indictment, meticulously sourced, narratively propulsive, and one of the defining works of investigative nonfiction in the last decade.
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Patrick Radden Keefe walks through three generations of the Sackler family, from their first Brooklyn-pharmacy fortune through Valium, the 1996 launch of OxyContin, and the long, ongoing reckoning that followed.
Yes. Empire of Pain is Patrick Radden Keefe's nonfiction history of the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin and a central figure in the American opioid crisis. The book is based on extensive original reporting.
Yes. Empire of Pain won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times bestseller. It is widely considered one of the definitive accounts of the American opioid epidemic.
Empire of Pain was written by Patrick Radden Keefe, published in 2021 by Doubleday.
Empire of Pain is 720 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Empire of Pain takes most readers 11 to 16 hours to finish.
Empire of Pain is a standalone novel by Patrick Radden Keefe, not part of a series.
Empire of Pain is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
