作者：PatrickRaddenKeefe
出版社：Doubleday
副标题：TheSecretHistoryoftheSacklerDynasty
出版年：2021-4-13
页数：560
定价：USD19.69
装帧：Hardcover
ISBN：9780385545686
内容简介
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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.
作者简介
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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.
评论 ······
被The Sacklers的一系列操作惊呆了，玩转FDA于掌心，获得暴利，再用慈善之名洗白，最后再玩一出宣告破产的金蝉脱壳，牛逼啊牛逼
非常全面详细，时间线到2020年，比Dreamland多5年。虽然Sacklers目前看来逃脱了司法惩罚，但是“To gather evidence and tell the story——the true story, the whole story, the story that had so long been suppressed——had a value of its own.”如果想要…
我以為Book 1的stereotypical老白男發家史已經很讓人血壓飆升了，沒想到Book 2&3裡二代三代們的pathological-denial and accountability-avoiding真是歎為觀止的rage-inducing。我相信第一代進入製藥業的出發點是好的，第二代發明oxycontin的出發點是好的。但因為上市前的研究不足，以及aggressive advertis…
第一部分arthur发家史尤其精彩，可以说是page-turner。要是配一副family tree这种人物关系图就更友好了。文笔很好（有用无用的词汇和表达又增加了！比如sunset做动词，还有好笑的oxySacklers）。作者搜集并厘清那么多资料和访谈，一边还要对付sackler那边的律师，最后汇总为一本五百多页的书（有点太厚，说真心话）！后面两部分有点在看傲骨之战的感觉，果然作者本身也是法律…
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