MixedThe Guardian (UK)It is not a gloomy book, although it dwells often on our collective failure to learn from past mistakes. Ferguson’s interest is the patterns and systems that emerge from the repetition, to which end he skips quite breezily through a rich catalogue of gruesome, miserable experiences ... when it comes to the pandemic, Ferguson starts to reveal his conservative aversion to big states. He is not exactly forgiving of Donald Trump (\'manifestly idiotic\' is the verdict on one episode of maladministration), but the former president is treated more as a pathetic accessory to the disaster than a motor of it ... Notably absent, too, is recognition of the fiscal background to Britain’s pandemic ... There are other flashes of political partisanship that feel out of place in a historical account ... the pandemic section of the book is unfinished and vulnerable to refutation by post-publication events. But by that stage in the narrative there is already a sense the book has drifted from its original purpose. What began as a taxonomy of doom evolves into a hawkish foreign policy treatise on the coming cold war with China. It is a bracing polemical finale that seems to round off a different book to the one that started in philosophical meditation over death as life’s unshakable shadow ... Doom covers an impressive sweep of history at a lively narrative clip and weaves a lot of disparate strands together into an engaging picture, even if they cannot, in the end, be arranged into a meaningful pattern. While it would have been a tidier volume if all of mankind’s historic woes had been drawn into a coherent model, with predictability and rules, it is to Ferguson’s credit as a historian that he accepts the futility of that endeavour. He is wise, in the end, not to posit a grand theory of catastrophe, when his exploration of the subject proves the absence of any such thing.
Jamie Susskind
RaveThe GuardianIf Future Politics focused only on the power of tech giants it would be a useful book covering familiar ground. But Susskind’s ambition is far greater. His subject is the full spectrum of disruption to the way humans have organized themselves since antiquity. It is an attempt to disassemble the fundamental concepts that underpin political life—justice, liberty, democracy, equality, property—and put them back together again in the context of a tech-driven revolution. At the very least, it is an impressive feat of intellectual organization ... Susskind’s meticulous method owes something, perhaps, to his background as a barrister, determined to assemble a watertight case. The rigor pays off because it exposes the conceptual magnitude of the change facing politicians and citizens ... The theory is mercifully leavened with self-deprecating humor. The author has a repertoire of cultural references, quotes and a knack for illustration of what would otherwise be arid philosophical quandaries ... It is mind-boggling enough just to contemplate the vastness of the challenge. To have written it all down so lucidly, engagingly and succinctly is a formidable achievement.
