Patrick Radden Keefe.
patrick radden keefe: SACKLERS BIOGRAPHY
empire of pain: the secret history of the sackler dynasty (2017)
Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize.
One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2021.
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Patrick Radden Keefe writes a compelling account of the rise and fall of the hugely wealthy Sackler family. The three Sackler brothers, children of Jewish immigrants, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1930s. All attended medical school, and together bought and developed a pharmaceutical company, Purdue Frederick. They were early pioneers in pharmaceutical development, and in the aggressive advertising of pharmaceuticals to doctors. Their notoriously addictive drug OxyContin, which was launched in 1996, played a prominent role in the opioid epidemic. The family, who had donated massively to museums and galleries across the world, faced thousands of law suits, settling for compensation payments of billions of dollars. Many of the institutions which had received philanthropy from the disgraced Sacklers deleted the Sackler name from the buildings into which it had been carved.
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Patrick Radden Keefe (born 1976) grew up in Massachusetts and attended Columbia University. He obtained masters’ degrees from the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics and has a law degree from Yale. He worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and has authored several books, including ‘Say Nothing’ the prize-winning account of a sectarian murder in Northern Ireland.
