76 pages • 2 hours read
Patrick Radden KeefeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Radden Keefe is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent critically acclaimed work Say Nothing, an account of a murder during the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the Council on Foreign Relations.
Empire of Pain began as a 2017 feature story on the life of Arthur Sackler and the Sackler family’s history as key context for the opioid use disorder crisis. In retaliation for his investigations, Radden Keefe was followed by private investigators, likely hired by the Sacklers, and had a particularly adversarial relationship with the family attorney hired by Mortimer and Kathe Sackler. He acknowledges that much of his source base for the work relied on anonymous sources, owing to the strong loyalty culture at Purdue. Radden Keefe is clearly dedicated to emphasizing the role of personality and family culture in the history of the opioid epidemic.
Arthur Sackler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1913, to Jewish immigrants who had high hopes for their oldest child. Arthur was ambitious and energetic, and “from an early age he evinced a set of qualities that would propel and shape his life—a singular vigor, a roving intelligence, and an inexhaustible ambition” (12).
By Patrick Radden Keefe
Addiction
View Collection
Art
View Collection
Books on Justice & Injustice
View Collection
Books on U.S. History
View Collection
Brothers & Sisters
View Collection
Business & Economics
View Collection
Challenging Authority
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Health & Medicine
View Collection
Inspiring Biographies
View Collection
Loyalty & Betrayal
View Collection
Mystery & Crime
View Collection
New York Times Best Sellers
View Collection
Politics & Government
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
Power
View Collection
Science & Nature
View Collection
The Best of "Best Book" Lists
View Collection
True Crime & Legal
View Collection
Trust & Doubt
View Collection