Is Empire of Pain Worth Reading?
The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Ada’s Score
Patrick Radden Keefe charts the rise of the Sackler family from immigrant strivers to one of America's wealthiest dynasties — and their central role in manufacturing and marketing OxyContin, fuelling the opioid epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and court documents, Keefe builds a damning portrait of a family that used philanthropy to launder a catastrophic legacy. The book is simultaneously a business history, a crime story, and a moral reckoning. It won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
Must Read“Corporate malfeasance as Greek tragedy — Keefe makes you feel the full human weight of every statistic.”
A Dynasty Built on Devastation
Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the finest narrative journalists alive, and Empire of Pain may be his masterwork — a meticulous, enraging, and oddly Shakespearean account of how the Sackler family built their fortune while OxyContin tore communities apart. It reads with the propulsion of a thriller and the moral weight of a reckoning. If you only read one piece of investigative nonfiction this year, let it be this one.
Ada Brief
AI reading intelligence“Corporate malfeasance as Greek tragedy — Keefe makes you feel the full human weight of every statistic.”
A Dynasty Built on Devastation
Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the finest narrative journalists alive, and Empire of Pain may be his masterwork — a meticulous, enraging, and oddly Shakespearean account of how the Sackler family built their fortune while OxyContin tore communities apart. It reads with the propulsion of a thriller and the moral weight of a reckoning. If you only read one piece of investigative nonfiction this year, let it be this one.
Book Details
- Publisher
- Periscopi
- Published
- January 1, 2021
- Pages
- 720
- Language
- English
Get This Book
Affiliate linksISBN: 9780593416280
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Ada’s Score
4.7
Ada’s editorial score — not an aggregate of reader reviews.
Common Questions About Empire of Pain
- Is Empire of Pain worth reading?
- Corporate malfeasance as Greek tragedy — Keefe makes you feel the full human weight of every statistic. Ada rates it 4.7 out of 5.
- How many pages is Empire of Pain?
- Empire of Pain is 720 pages long — around 12–13 hours at an average reading pace.
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