February Narrative Medicine Rounds with Patrick Radden Keefe

For our first Narrative Medicine Rounds of 2022, on February 2nd, we were very excited to host Patrick Radden Keefe, author of EMPIRE OF PAIN: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, in a conversation moderated by Carl Erik Fisher. 

Empire of Pain is 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. An instant bestseller, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, and named one of the best books of 2021 by the New York Times, Time, The Economist, Boston Globe, Guardian, The Times (London), The Atlantic, Businessweek, Financial Times, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and many others, the book is a masterfully researched and reported work of nonfiction, and tells a history that absolutely all of us should know. 

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and also the author of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, as well as two other books: The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, and Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. Patrick started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and has written investigative narrative nonfiction on a range of subjects, from the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman to the tragic personal history of the mass shooter Amy Bishop. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016. Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade.” He is also the writer and host of WIND OF CHANGE, an 8-part podcast series from Pineapple Street Studios, Crooked Media and Spotify, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and pop music during the Cold War and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian.

Keefe was in conversation with Carl Erik Fisher, whose book THE URGE: Our History of Addiction was published on January 25, 2022. THE URGE is an authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself. 

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds is now available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there. You can also listen to a podcast of past Rounds on iTunes.