Empire of Pain: The Secret of the Sackler Dynasty
This is a great (read: infuriating) book, but for someone like me who works in the pharma industry and had a first hand seat to the fall of Mallinckrodt (a similar, less culpable just because of scale player in the opioid crisis) I wasn’t as shocked as some of my friends were by the actions of Purdue through the middle of this book. Besides, things keep coming out about how terrible all of these actors are, so a book that attempts to comprehensively catalogue their various misdeeds is doomed to be out of date almost immediately.
What is super interesting, though, is the bits about the history of the Sacklers and how they got to be Purdue in the first place. Your mileage may vary as to how interesting you find it, of course, but the entire first section—and that denouement wherein one branch of the family sells their stake in Purdue for mere tens (or hundreds?) of millions, “in what would turn out to be financially a mistake”—is tension and creeping horror as maybe only a financially-minded pharma person can appreciate.
Demon Copperhead
Makes me want to reread David Copperfield a bit—or maybe watch the movie by Iannucci? I think I appreciate books that touch on traumatic or difficult situations without overemphasizing said trauma, because at some point my synapses blow out and then I find it hard to empathize with anything. I don’t entirely know what that says about me but it does impact my ability to absorb information.
The digression into the opioid phase was not what I was expecting and perhaps the length made the ending a bit hard to come around to emotionally? Perhaps an interesting one to read bookended with the Empire of Pain, to see first-hand the cost of the opioid epidemic? It felt like that section of the book was quite long, and overshadowed the other parts. Having read a number of similar accounts—both fiction and non-fiction—it felt well written but not particularly novel. But all in all, a very YMMV situation.