Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe — the explosive, award-winning investigation into one of America’s wealthiest and most controversial families.

The Sackler name once adorned the walls of the world’s greatest museums, universities, and medical institutions. Behind the philanthropy lay a fortune built first on Valium and later on OxyContin — the blockbuster painkiller that helped ignite the opioid crisis and has been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

In this searing work of narrative nonfiction, New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe traces three generations of the Sackler family. From the ambitious rise of Arthur Sackler and his brothers in the mid-20th century to the ruthless marketing of OxyContin and the family’s determined efforts to evade accountability, Empire of Pain reveals a story of greed, power, and the human cost of prioritizing profit over public health.

Drawing on extensive reporting, court documents, and exclusive interviews, Keefe delivers a gripping, meticulously researched account that reads like a thriller while exposing the systems that allowed a private family to amass extraordinary wealth at tremendous societal cost.

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, Empire of Pain is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the roots of one of the defining public-health crises of our time.