Imagine On Air presents Patrick Radden Keefe

Imagine On Air presents Patrick Radden Keefe

Wordfest’s Imagine On Air presents award-winning New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe and his highly-anticipated exposé of the Sackler family's devastating connection to the opioid crisis: Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. The hour-long conversation will start at 7:00 PM MT and will be hosted by Shelley Youngblut, Worldfest’s CEO and Creative Ringleader.  (The pre-show will begin at 6:50 PM.) This livestream broadcast is free and if you RSVP, we'll send you a reminder on the day of the show, as well as our unique Digital Doggie Bag after the event with extras and links sparked by the conversation.

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for us to connect you with Patrick Radden Keefe.

About Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

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, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The Sackler name adorns 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. 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.

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.

About Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.

Buy the Book

Owl's Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Borrow the Book

Calgary Public Library

Curiouser

Articles:

• The Family That Built An Empire of Pain –The New Yorker
• Sackler Family Secrets: New Book Reveals OxyContin Heirs' Self-Pitying Emails -Daily Beast
• For Him, The Delight is in the Digging -The New York Times

Reviews:

• For the Sackler Family, a dynasty built on medicine, marketing and pain -The Washington Post
• Spoonfuls of Sugar - airmail