NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - 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.
"A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail...a masterful work of narrative report." - Laura Miller, Slate
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, but the source of the family fortune was vague--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 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. It follows the family's early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug's addictiveness. 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.
A masterpiece of narrative report, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America's second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world's great fortunes.
媒体评价
「一个引人入胜且不断引起愤慨的故事,描述了奋斗史、秘辛和自我欺骗……基夫以灵活的写作手法,带领读者穿越家族多重勾心斗角和背叛……就连在详述最龌龊的情节时,依然以平缓而令人钦佩的克制语气娓娓道来,由惊人的报导内容来陈述就分量十足。他对该家族的描绘如此鲜明,罪证更是不言自明。」──珍妮弗.萨莱(Jennifer Szalai),《纽约时报》(The New York Times)
「一出包含多幕的真实悲剧,一个失去了道德准则的家族……《疼痛帝国》以小说的手法描述一个家族王朝的家族关系,有如药物界的福尔赛世家(Forsyte Saga)。这是一本令人上瘾,翻开就停不下来的精彩好书。」──大卫.史里曼(David M. Shribman),《波士顿环球报》(Boston Globe)
作者简介
派崔克.拉登.基夫(Patrick Radden Keefe)
《纽约客》(The New Yorker)编制内撰稿人,著有《蛇头:唐人街黑社会与美国梦的史诗故事》(The Snakehead:An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,2009)、《喋喋不休:揭开梯队系统监视网络和全球窃听的秘密世界》(Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping,2006)、《什么都别说:北爱尔兰谋杀与记忆的真实故事》(Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland)、《疼痛帝国:萨克勒家族制药王朝秘史》(Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,2021),本书获得2021年巴美列.捷福奖(Baillie Gifford Prize)非虚构写作奖,以及《坏胚子:骗子、杀手、叛徒与无赖的真实故事》(Rogues: True Stories of Grifters,Killers,Rebels and Crooks,2022)等广受好评的著作。基夫也制作并主持了八集Podcast节目《变迁之风》(Wind of Change),讨论冷战时期间谍与重金属音乐的奇异交集,登上2020年《娱乐周刊》(Entertainment Weekly)Podcast排行榜榜首,在《卫报》(The Guardian)网站有一千万次以上的收听下载纪录。
2014年基夫获颁美国国家杂志奖(National Magazine Award)特稿写作奖,2015、2016年入围美国国家杂志奖报导写作奖。此外,基夫也曾荣获古根汉奖学金(Guggenheim Fellowship)与新美国基金会(New America)和温迪.施密特奖学金(Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship)。在此之前,基夫曾在求学时期获得英国马歇尔奖学金(Marshall Scholarship),并陆续于剑桥大学和伦敦政经学院进修两个硕士学位,后来取得耶鲁大学法律博士学位。基夫成长于波士顿,现居纽约。
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, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the "10 Best 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.
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