Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction 2022 - Group G)

 I went into reading this book with an understanding that it has been a nonfiction darling from 2021 and was likely to be an extremely readable book. That being said, I personally had no intention of picking this book up anytime soon (nor had I previously read anything by Radden Keefe, despite his popularity since the publication of his last book). While unsurprised at the readability of this book, it was even more of a page-turner than I expected, which is saying something!

    A journalist by trade, Radden Keefe writes with a superb logical flow and style that is effortless to read and as engaging as good true crime, while also delicately and thoughtfully handling nuance and the ongoing nature of this story. This book is true to its subtitle in that it specifically follows the eponymous and mysterious Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical company and creators and masterminds behind OxyContin. This book gets intentionally personal when it comes to tracking the history and exploits of this family, and tracing the path that brings us to the modern day opioid crisis and — equally disturbing — the pharmaceutical industry’s reliance on medical marketing for profit-making purposes. The physical copy of this book includes a limited family tree for the Sackler family, and a reader can feel like a detective stacking up clues and following family lines, trying to untangle the showmanship, con artistry, intentional vagueness yet overt personal myth-making that has led us to this point in the Sackler saga. While this book covers a notably intricate and tangled story, Radden Keefe makes it feel like your good friend is telling you a wild story at the bar over a beer, with his extremely high quality prose, engaging tone and pace, and ability to pull together different strands of the story to make a cohesive picture. This strikes the reader as even more impressive once you have finished the story and read the note on sources that explains that the Sackler’s themselves refused to comment on the book but the narrative was drawn largely from their words from collections of papers, letters, biographies, depositions, and internal company documents. Clearly, Radden Keefe attains high marks for authorial voice, writing quality, and the structure and organization of the ideas in this book.

    In terms of a thesis for this work, in addition to generally chronicling the bonkers story of this painfully American of family oligarchies, Radden Keefe does a good job of pointing fingers at the larger systemic problems that lie under the surface of the Sackler family story. By focusing on the family as the heart of the story, the author personalizes class consciousness, inherited wealth, and the Mob-like running of the United States by very large, extremely legitimized corporations. Because the main Sackler business (Purdue Pharma) was privately held, Radden Keefe doesn’t talk about the excesses of publicly traded entities. The Federal government, however, is a different story and the author does not shy away from implicating the FDA and the Justice Department (specifically under George W. Bush) in some major ways in this book. While the story maintains cohesion by returning to the Sackler characters who we know and certainly do not love, the bigger thesis of the book really points to a massive system run amok, and directly being exploited by ultra-wealthy people who have been able to stash away most of their money in hidden accounts on the shores of tax havens. The biggest downer while reading this book is, ultimately, that the bad guy really looks to be getting away (as of the end of this book), but there was also no resolution to the current law suits at the time of publication, nor is there full resolution today.

    As you can probably tell from my glowing review of this book, this story falls completely within my wheelhouse of nonfiction with a journalistic quality that follows corporations, corruption, and systemic abuse (think Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow, and We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper). Despite all of this, I did walk away from this book with some real qualms about its impact. In particular, I am left wondering if this genre sensationalizes activities that are pretty banal in the United States, doing a disservice to the conversations we need to have about personal culpability in systemic problems. In my opinion, to work for a large organization or within a large system that exploits people is what it means to exist in capitalism in the United States right now. The individual workers within that system actually do have culpability in maintaining all the bits and pieces that really allow that system to run on a day-to-day basis. By focusing on the big family names and celebrity names (which certainly are deserving of focus, especially when they have tried to dodge culpability and avoid paying any price for their abhorrent actions), are we avoiding a conversation about how we as individuals can actually push back against these systems, even while trying to survive within them? I actually think the need to place the spotlight on the Sacklers in this specific case outweighs the harm of focusing on a specific family empire. Additionally, Radden Keefe addresses this question directly by referring in his notes on sources section that he felt like he was witnessing a “collective amnesia” when reviewing testimony from those who had previously worked at Purdue Pharma. This is the closest the author gets to directly noting that a system of workers enabled the evil work of Purdue Pharma (undoubtedly at the direction of the Sackler family and their compatriots), and I wish he had discussed this a bit more in the book.

    Overall though, this is an extremely strong nonfiction book with a timely and important premise to share and a fantastic writing quality, organization, and general feel to the reading experience. I would highly recommend this book for laypersons and people who do not read much nonfiction because it is well written and compelling, while dealing with topics that are critical to modern American life.