Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty [Paperback] Keefe, ...

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE
YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A grand, devastating portrait of three
generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune
was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the
prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing The history of the Sackler
dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; 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. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many
storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the
Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their
lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family
fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were
responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the
catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain begins with the story of three
doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who
weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism.
Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and
conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius
for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad
firm.Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great
Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which
would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and
wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and
grandchildren grew up in luxury.Forty years later, Raymond’s son Richard ran
the family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell
Valium—co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s
addictiveness—was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The
drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to
launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die. This
is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would
leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early
twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut,
and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Empire of Pain
chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and
the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade
accountability. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and
writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait
of the excesses of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the
super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference
to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (May 11, 2021)


• Language ‏ : ‎ English


• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 992 pages


• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593416287


• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 80


• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2 pounds


• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.07 x 1.63 x 9.16 inches


• Best Sellers Rank: #603,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #110 in Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Industry (Books) #266 in White Collar Crime True Accounts #2,194 in Criminology (Books)


• #110 in Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Industry (Books)

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