Author Talk: Patrick Radden Keefe, EMPIRE OF PAIN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SACKLER DYNASTY

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 sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

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, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten 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.

About the host
Karen Dukess is the author of The Last Book Party, “a spare, bittersweet page-turner (NYTimes),” which was an IndieNext and Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations Development Programme. She has blogged on raising boys for The Huffington Post and written book reviews for USA Today. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro.