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, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing The Sackler name adorns 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, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, 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 begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm. Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury. Forty years later, Raymond’s son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue.

The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium–co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness–was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die. This 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.

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. 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. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

A probing history of the CIA’s evolving role from the outset of the Cold War into the 1960s, viewed through the exploits of four American spies. On the heels of Germany’s defeat in World War II, European leaders and intelligence agents were shifting focus to the Soviet Union’s dominance over Eastern Europe and threatening pursuit of influence in Asia. Under a recently sworn-in President Harry Truman, the American government was slower to gauge early. signals but eventually responded with often disastrous covert tactics. Anderson delivers a complex, massively scaled narrative, balancing prodigious research with riveting storytelling skills. He tracks the careers of four agents. In the Philippines, Edward Lansdale was instrumental in combatting the Hukbalahap uprising, lining up Ramon Magsaysay, the secretary of defense, to become president in 1954. Peter Sichel, a German Jew whose family escaped the Nazis, ran the CIA’s Berlin office for more than a decade. Former naval officer Michael Burke headed the paramilitary operations in Albania and elsewhere. Frank Wisner, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, had key roles in the Office of Policy Coordination until its full merging with the CIA in 1950. Though all four men began their careers with the strong desire to defend American freedom, the author
engagingly demonstrates how their efforts were undermined by politically motivated power grabs within the
U.S. government; poorly planned covert operations; and duplicitous scheming by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover
and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who were espousing anti-communist rhetoric to advance their own careers. “By
the end of Eisenhower’s second term,” writes Anderson, “the geographical spread of governments that his
administration had undertaken to overthrow or otherwise subvert suggested an almost purposeful design, as if
it sought to alienate the citizenry of most every region and subregion of the globe.” Over the course of the
narrative, the author amply shows how the CIA was increasingly pushed to function as an instrument of
politically charged ambitions.
An engrossing history of the early days of the CIA.

A PROMISED LAND
BY BARACK OBAMA ‧ RELEASE DATE: NOV. 17, 2020

In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.

In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.

A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.

THE CODE BREAKER
JENNIFER DOUDNA, GENE EDITING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE
BY WALTER ISAACSON ‧

A magisterial biography of the co-discoverer of what has been called the greatest advance in biology since the discovery of DNA.

For the first third of Isaacson’s latest winner, the author focuses on the life and career of Jennifer Doudna (b. 1964). Raised by academic parents who encouraged her fascination with science, she flourished in college and went on to earn a doctorate in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard. After fellowships and postdoc programs at the University of Colorado and Yale, she joined the faculty at the University of California in 2002. In 2006, she learned about CRISPR, a system of identical repeated DNA sequences in bacteria copied from certain viruses. Others had discovered that this was a defense mechanism—CRISPR DNA generates enzymes that chop up the DNA of the infecting virus. With collaborators, she discovered how CRISPR operates and invented a much simpler technique for cutting DNA and editing genes. Although known since the 1970s, “genetic engineering” was a complex, tedious process. CRISPR made it much simpler. Formally accepted by the editors of Science in 2012, the co-authored paper galvanized the scientific establishment and led to a torrent of awards, culminating in the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. At this point, Isaacson steps back, keeping Doudna as the central character but describing the rush to apply gene editing to altering life and curing diseases, the intense debate over its morality, and the often shameful quarrels over credit and patents. A diligent historian and researcher, Isaacson lucidly explains CRISPR and refuses to pass it off as a far-fetched magic show. Some scientific concepts (nuclear fission, evolution) are easy to grasp but not CRISPR. Using charts, analogies, and repeated warnings for readers to pay attention, the author describes a massively complicated operation in which humans can program heredity. Those familiar with college-level biology will have a better time, but nobody will regret the reading experience.

A vital book about the next big thing in science—and yet another top-notch biography from Isaacson.

Relevant story about using mRNA to make the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html?searchResultPosition=1

Side read courtesy of Bert.  https://interestingengineering.com/crispr-breakthrough-scientists-can-now-turn-genes-on-and-off-at-whim

Tom Igoe’s notes:  Notes on Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson from Tom Igoe

The New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor tells the thrilling true story of the most important female spy in history: an agent code-named “Sonya,” who set the stage for the Cold War. In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb. This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named “Sonya.” Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI-and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century-between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy-and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times. With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers

THE NEW MAP

A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA
BY ISABEL ALLENDE ; TRANSLATED BY NICK CAISTOR & AMANDA HOPKINSON

Two refugees from the Spanish Civil War cross the Atlantic Ocean to Chile and a half-century of political and personal upheavals.

We meet Victor Dalmau and Roser Bruguera in 1938 as it is becoming increasingly clear that the Republican cause they support is doomed. When they reunite in France as penniless refugees, Roser has survived a harrowing flight across the Pyrenees while heavily pregnant and given birth to the son of Victor’s brother Guillem, killed at the Battle of the Ebro. Victor, evacuated with the wounded he was tending in a makeshift hospital, learns of a ship outfitted by poet Pablo Neruda to take exiles to a new life in Chile, but he and Roser must marry in order to gain a berth. Allende (In the Midst of Winter, 2017, etc.) expertly sets up this forced intimacy between two very different people: Resolute, realistic Roser never looks back and doggedly pursues a musical career in Chile while Victor, despite being fast-tracked into medical school by socialist politician Salvador Allende (a relative of the author’s), remains melancholy and nostalgic for his homeland. Their platonic affection deepens into physical love and lasting commitment in an episodic narrative that reaches a catastrophic climax with the 1973 coup overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected government. For Victor and Roser, this is a painful reminder of their losses in Spain and the start of new suffering. The wealthy, conservative del Solar family provides a counterpoint to the idealistic Dalmaus; snobbish, right-wing patriarch Isidro and his hysterically religious wife, Laura, verge on caricature, but Allende paints more nuanced portraits of eldest son Felipe, who smooths the refugees’ early days in Chile, and daughter Ofelia, whose brief affair with Victor has lasting consequences. Allende tends to describe emotions and events rather than delve into them, and she paints the historical backdrop in very broad strokes, but she is an engaging storyteller. A touching close in 1994 brings one more surprise and unexpected hope for the future to 80-year-old Victor.

A trifle facile, but this decades-spanning drama is readable and engrossing throughout.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power–which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people–including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others–she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of America life today

Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and two other masterly books about World War II, has long been admired for his unparalleled ability to write deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative history. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he tells the story of the first twenty months of the bloody struggle to shake free of King George’s shackles. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, the ragtag Continental Army takes on the world’s most formidable fighting force and gradually finds the will and the way to win. It is a riveting saga populated by singular characters: Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an uncanny understanding of how best to deploy artillery; Nathaniel Greene, the blue-eyed bumpkin who becomes one of America’s greatest battle captains; Benjamin Franklin, the self-made man who proves himself the nation’s greatest diplomat; George Washington, the commander-in-chief who learns the difficult art of leadership amid the fire and smoke of the battlefield. And the British are here, too: we see the war through their eyes and their gunsights, and as a consequence the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels is all the more compelling. Full of fresh details and untold stories, The British Are Coming gives stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama. It is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. But once begun, the war for independence can have only one of two outcomes: death or victory.

Sept 9, 2020, 12:00

THE GREAT INFLUENZA
THE EPIC STORY OF THE DEADLIEST PLAGUE IN HISTORY
BY JOHN M. BARRY

A keen recounting of the 1918–20 pandemic.

This deadly global flu outbreak has gotten hazy in the public memory, and its origins and character were unclear from the beginning, writes popular historian Barry (Rising Tide, 1997, etc.). But influenza tore apart the world’s social fabric for two long years, and it would be a mistake to forget its lessons. (It also tore apart the American medical establishment—but that was for the good.) With the same terrorizing flair of Richard Preston’s Hot Zone, the author follows the disease in the way he might shadow a mugger, presenting us with the vivid aftereffects as if from Weegee’s camera: “Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.” But Barry is not interested simply in hugely disturbing numbers. He charts how the pandemic brought a measure of scientific maturity to the medical world and profiles such important personalities as Paul Lewis and William Henry Welch, institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Rockefeller Institute, and the Red Cross. He covers with an easy touch the evolution in our understanding of viral disease and the strides that have been made to counter its effects, such as vaccines. He watches the flu spread until there aren’t enough coffins to house the bodies, and he watches as the military fails to alert the general public because the brass feared it would hurt wartime morale. Influenza appears to have spread like a prairie fire from a military base in Kansas throughout the world, thanks to WWI troop deployment and the disease’s highly contagious nature. There was nowhere to hide, Barry chillingly explains: “It now seemed as if there had never been life before the epidemic. The disease informed every action of every person.” Emerging viruses, including new strains of flu, will likely visit us again.

Majestic, spellbinding treatment of a mass killer.