Books by Patrick Radden Keefe
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Winner of Winners Prize, which aims to pick out the best nonfiction book of the past 25 years
“It’s an extraordinary book. He’s writing of extraordinary things, but that alone won’t make it a good book. There’s incredible artistry in putting this story together. And because he has a very transparent style—he’s a New Yorker staff writer—and it’s not fancy, it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, he just had to research it and write it down.’ But no, it’s incredibly beautifully done. It’s about the Sackler scandal, this family that’s made a fortune out of Oxycontin, this very, very addictive opioid that’s killed more Americans than have died in all the wars the country has fought since the Second World War. What he does is go back and look at the origins of the company, Purdue Pharma. It’s a fascinating story. It’s an immigrant family, Russian Jewish. The father has a grocer’s shop. They work incredibly hard. Against all the odds the three boys, the first generation, all become doctors. It is the American dream. They’re doing something extraordinary and it’s admirable at the start.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Kathryn Hughes, Literary Scholar
“If you’ve grown up in the UK, Gerry Adams and other prominent Republicans, will be familiar figures. But seeing them rendered like this, we get an incredibly intimate view of the movement and how and why people got involved. It doesn’t shy away from the brutality, and you get a very clear view of the complicity of the British state. It does that, again, through close personal retellings. So it’s wide, but also focused. You move between different people who were affected and involved. It’s very vivid, very gripping, and illuminates a familiar and very close part of history, at least for those of us living in the UK.” Read more...
The Best Narrative Nonfiction Books
Samira Shackle, Journalist
Interviews where books by Patrick Radden Keefe were recommended
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1
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
by Anna Funder -
2
Nothing to Envy
by Barbara Demick -
3
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo -
4
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
by Patrick Radden Keefe -
5
City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
by Ben Rawlence
The Best Narrative Nonfiction Books, recommended by Samira Shackle
The Best Narrative Nonfiction Books, recommended by Samira Shackle
Narrative nonfiction is a style of writing that takes the facts and dramatises them to create novelistic retellings of real life events. Samira Shackle, author of Karachi Vice, a book that offers vivid insight into the lives of five of the city’s residents, recommends five books that have inspired her—and explains how a writer might begin to carve ‘plot’ and ‘characters’ from reams of research material.
Books Made into Movies in 2023, recommended by Five Books Interviews
As filmmakers continue to turn to books to inspire new movies, we’ve put together a list of books that have been recommended on Five Books that have appeared on the screen this year or are currently in production. Notable are the number of nonfiction books being turned into movies, an indication of how many books are currently being published that tell compelling stories that happen, also, to be true.
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1
Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed the World
by Margaret MacMillan -
2
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro -
3
Nothing to Envy
by Barbara Demick -
4
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe -
5
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
by Wade Davis -
6
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
by Craig Brown
The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners, recommended by Sophie Roell
The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners, recommended by Sophie Roell
“All the best stories are true” runs the tagline of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the UK’s pre-eminent nonfiction book award. This year, to celebrate the prize’s 25th birthday, a panel of judges picked out books for a winner of winners award, making for an excellent collection of nonfiction books from the last quarter of a century, as Five Books editor Sophie Roell explains.
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1
The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations
by Robert Livingston -
2
The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources
by Jack Farchy & Javier Blas -
3
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe -
4
The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
by Michael E Mann -
5
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth -
6
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
The Best Business Books: the 2021 FT & McKinsey Book Award, recommended by Andrew Hill
The Best Business Books: the 2021 FT & McKinsey Book Award, recommended by Andrew Hill
Every year the Financial Times’s management editor, Andrew Hill, helps organize its ‘Business Book of the Year’ award, which celebrates outstanding books relating to business in the broadest sense. Here, he talks us through the 2021 shortlist, six books that will draw you in and open your eyes to how events happening in the world of business affect all of us–sometimes in very profound ways.
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1
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
by Harald Jähner & Shaun Whiteside (translator) -
2
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe -
3
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape
by Cal Flyn -
4
Things I Have Withheld
by Kei Miller -
5
Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron
by John Preston -
6
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
by Lea Ypi
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist, recommended by Kathryn Hughes
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist, recommended by Kathryn Hughes
Every year the judges of the Baillie Gifford Prize pick out the very best nonfiction books, the shortlist they come up with a brilliant way to find gripping books to immerse yourself in. Here cultural historian Kathryn Hughes, one of this year’s judges, talks us through the six books they chose for the 2021 shortlist, books that will draw you in, whatever the subject.