Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It Was Capitalism All Along

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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I read these two books practically back to back (well, with Jakob Kerr’s Dead Money sandwiched in between, for a fictional version of the profit-at-all-costs mentality), and combined with the current political climate, I’m ready to wheel out the guillotine. PRK’s Empire of Pain is, predictably, a well-researched and thorough discussion of three generations of the Sackler family, who manage to become more feckless the more distant they are from Purdue Pharma’s founding three brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond. However, the “entrepreneurial spirit” that seizes these brothers, particularly […]

Read It, Jake, It’s Chinatown

The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and OxyContin, are two of the greatest non-fiction books I’ve read. And while I had a keen interest in the subject matter of the former, I had no real connection to the topic of the latter. In the aftermath of so thoroughly enjoying Empire of Pain, I decided that I would read anything Patrick Radden Keefe wrote, no matter what it was about. That, of course, meant […]

last two! an opioid double header

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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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, […]

Strong Investigating But Hard to Get Into

The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Best for: People interested in the concepts of immigration and human trafficking. In a nutshell: Keef explores the life of Sister Ping, a woman who helped smuggle thousands of people to the US from China, and along the way looks at the history of immigration laws and the lengths people will go to when they want to build a different life. Worth quoting: N/A Why I chose it: I’ve read all of Keefe’s other books, and really enjoyed most of them. Review: I am someone […]

Rogues, the whole lot of them.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Last year I did a Patrick Radden Keefe double-header: Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. It was… a doozy. Keefe writes incredibly well (he’s got a slew of awards to prove it) and excels at deep dives into larger-than-life personalities. When Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks went on sale on Chirp I scooped it up. Rogues is a collection of Keefe’s previous writings for The New Yorker. Keefe describes in his preface how journalists often develop a lane, and while he […]

“The risks may be formidable, but the high is sublime.”

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

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We recently read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver for my book club. I was very impressed with it, and we inevitably began talking about the devastation of the opioid epidemic. I’m pretty sure I’d seen Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe on book lists and recommendations. But after reading Demon Copperhead, I had a renewed interest in learning more about the specifics. It also helped that we’d already read Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and it came highly recommended by a fellow […]



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