Empire of Pain

Empire of Pain PDF Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 038554569X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned 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, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

Empire of Pain

Empire of Pain PDF Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 038554569X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 574

Get Book Here

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned 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, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

The Inner Life of Empires

The Inner Life of Empires PDF Author: Emma Rothschild
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century family They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment. One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as "Bell or Belinda," who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux. Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family's complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.

Venice's Intimate Empire

Venice's Intimate Empire PDF Author: Erin Maglaque
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice’s Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean. Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice’s Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making. Venice’s Intimate Empire thus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families’ experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians’ relationships to empire—its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures—were determined.

The Seleukid Empire 281-222 BC

The Seleukid Empire 281-222 BC PDF Author: Kyle Erickson
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
ISBN: 1910589950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The Seleukids, the easternmost of the Greek-speaking dynasties which succeeded Alexander the Great, were long portrayed by historians as inherently weak and doomed to decline after the death of their remarkable first king, Seleukos (281 BC). And yet they succeeded in ruling much of the Near and Middle East for over two centuries, overcoming problems of a multi-ethnic empire. In this book an international team of young, established scholars argues that in the decades after Seleukos the empire developed flexible structures that successfully bound it together in the face of a series of catastrophes. The strength of the Seleukid realm lay not simply in its vast swathes of territory, but rather in knowing how to tie the new, frequently non-Greek, nobility to the king through mutual recognition of sovereignty.

Sugar in the Blood

Sugar in the Blood PDF Author: Andrea Stuart
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030796115X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire

Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire PDF Author: Beth Severy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134391838
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In this lively and detailed study, Beth Severy examines the relationship between the emergence of the Roman Empire and the status and role of this family in Roman society. The family is placed within the social and historical context of the transition from republic to empire, from Augustus' rise to sole power into the early reign of his successor Tiberius. Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire is an outstanding example of how, if we examine "private" issues such as those of family and gender, we gain a greater understanding of "public" concerns such as politics, religion and history. Discussing evidence from sculpture to cults and from monuments to military history, the book pursues the changing lines between public and private, family and state that gave shape to the Roman imperial system.

Colonial Relations

Colonial Relations PDF Author: Adele Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107037611
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
A new perspective on the nineteenth-century imperial world through one family's history across North America, the Caribbean and United Kingdom. Revealing how these figures demonstrate complicated historical trajectories of empire and nation, Adele Perry illustrates how gender, intimacy, and family were key to making and remaking imperial politics.

Empire Families

Empire Families PDF Author: Elizabeth Buettner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199249075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
What was life like for the British men, women, and children who lived in late imperial India while serving the Raj? Empire Families treats the Raj as a family affair and examines how, and why, many remained linked with India over several generations.Due to the fact that India was never meant for permanent European settlement, many families developed deep-rooted ties with India while never formally emigrating. Their lives were dominated by long periods of residence abroad punctuated by repeated travels between Britain and India: childhood overseas followed by separation from parents and education in Britain; adult returns to India through careers or marriage; furloughs, and ultimately retirement, in Britain. As a result, many Britonsneither felt themselves to be rooted in India, nor felt completely at home when back in Britain. Their permanent impermanence led to the creation of distinct social realities and cultural identities.Empire Families sets out to recreate this society by looking at a series of families, their lives in India, and their travels back to Britain. Focusing for the first time on the experiences of parents and children alike, and including the Beveridge, Butler, Orwell, and Kipling families, Elizabeth Buettner uncovers the meanings of growing up in the Raj and an itinerant imperial lifestyle.

The Sugar Barons

The Sugar Barons PDF Author: Matthew Parker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802777988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Traces the rise and fall of Caribbean sugar dynasties, discussing the Britain's dependence on colony wealth, the role of slavery in sugar plantation culture, and the North American colonial opposition to sugar policy in London.

Servant of the Empire

Servant of the Empire PDF Author: Raymond E. Feist
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0525480242
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
"A sweeping drama unveiling a tale of love, hate and sacrifice against the panorama of an alien yet familiar society."--Publishers Weekly. "Uncommonly satisfying."--Locus