What makes a novel like a choose your own adventure for adults? Liz Egan will be here to discuss

her latest pick for group text, The Novel What Clubs After. Plus, we'll talk about what

we and the wider world are reading. This is the Bookerview Podcast from the New York

Times. It's April 23rd. I'm Pamela Paul.

Patrick Redden Keef joins us now. His new book is called Empire of Pain, the Secret

History of the Sackler Dynasty. Patrick, thanks for being here.

Thanks so much for having me back.

So let's start with a very basic question in case people are not aware of the Sackler

family and why you would be writing about them with a title like Empire of Pain, who are

the Sacklers?

So, there's sort of two ways to answer that question. Until a few years ago, what the

Sackler name meant generally to the extent that people were aware of this family, it was

a very, very wealthy family, one of the wealthiest families in the United States with a branch

in the UK in London, and they were known chiefly for philanthropy.

Right, art museum wings.

Hundreds of millions of dollars to art museums and universities and medical research, and

would very often put their name on these bequests. So if you, you know, in New York City,

you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and there's the Sackler wing, and that was what

they were known for. What was more mysterious was the source of this wealth, and it has,

people have become more widely aware recently that the bulk of this wealth comes from a

company, Purdue Pharma, which produces the powerful painkiller oxy-contin.

In this era in which the naming of things and the un-naming of things, the mounting and

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