Keefe, building on two decades of news coverage, as well as his own research and interviews, depicts a family that amassed billions and billions of dollars in private wealth, mainly through the production and marketing of a drug - Ox圜ontin - that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. This prompts a lot of greed-filled plot twists, but Damian, a sweet innocent if there ever was one, is at the center of that plot, and, in the end, he uses the money to help some needy people a continent away.Įmpire of Pain is the biography of a family, designed to make the reader’s skin crawl and blood boil, unless the reader is somehow related to a Sackler. One night, from the sky, a very large bag lands at his feet, containing 229,370 British pounds, the equivalent of 323,056 euros. It’s the poignant and hilarious story of a nine-year-old British boy name Damian who is an expert about saints - and even speaks with them. So, I picked up and re-read Frank Cottrell Boyce’s endearing novel Millions. I was sick and tired - and more than a bit bored - of spending so much time with the self-important, amoral and insanely rich Sackler family. Two-thirds of the way through Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2021 Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, I had to take a break.
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