A passionate, well-informed insider’s account of one of the most controversial bankruptcies in U.S. history.
An opioid-victims’ advocate vents his fury about the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy that allowed the Sackler family to avoid prison and keep most of their fortune.
Several years into his recovery from opioid addiction, Hampton had a modest knowledge of the law when the Department of Justice appointed him to the official Unsecured Creditors Committee in the Purdue bankruptcy case. He soon became co-chair of the nine-member group, which included four private citizens as well as institutional heavyweights like CVS Pharmacy and which had a fiduciary duty to thousands of claimants against Purdue. The author combines the sarcasm of an early Bill Bryson travelogue with the disbelief of Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this breezy but informative memoir of his falling down a rabbit hole of negotiation, mediation, and Zoom calls as he pushed for a fair shake for victims. Many of his frustrations involved the Sacklers’ army of nuclear-strength law firms like Jones Day, “the firm that had previously represented such stand-up characters as the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the bin Laden family.” Other maddening setbacks involved cash grabs by states that hadn’t spent much of the federal money they’d already received to fight the opioid crisis, power plays that deprived victims of urgently needed financial help. Hampton finds it small comfort that Purdue ultimately pleaded guilty to multiple felonies and agreed to pay about $750 million to victims, or up to $48,000 per death from a Purdue product. “This wasn’t a bankruptcy,” writes the author, “it was a heist.” Hampton recaps some of the background on the opioid crisis found in stellar books such as Chris McGreal’s American Overdose and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, but he offers a unique firsthand perspective on a bankruptcy he credibly portrays as yet another injustice to Purdue’s victims.
A passionate, well-informed insider’s account of one of the most controversial bankruptcies in U.S. history.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-27316-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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