... stimulating ... it’s [Ferguson's] historical analysis of how disasters occur, rather than his crystal ball gazing, that’s the most interesting part of his book ... there many new insights here, notably that for all the criticisms levelled at Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and others, it’s facile to blame the person at the top for all that goes wrong when usually the real culprit in a catastrophe is a system failure ... Much of Ferguson’s story is told with zest, with extracts from Monty Python, Daniel Defoe and the poetry of John Donne deployed in the course of his arguments, although at other times his text is challenging ... I also wonder why a book published here by a British historian is presented in Americanese, even if Ferguson does now live in the US. Allen Lane would have done well to have produced an edition properly tailored to a domestic audience ... Its range seems strange at times too, with an analysis of US policy towards China, which Ferguson believes was broadly successful under Trump, at odds with earlier discussions of earthquakes and other natural disasters ... Each chapter of this thought-provoking book is worth reading for the ideas, perceptiveness and well-told stories of landmark events. The subject might not seem immediately appealing in such bleak times, but readers will find much to relish nonetheless.
Much is thought-provoking, much fascinating, much in this accumulation of detail wearisome, much confusing. I would guess that this is a book many will dip into and find fascinating information and speculation, but few will read through ... Ferguson is at his best when he examines government and public responses to disasters ... Ferguson ranges widely, sometimes confusingly, and deluges us with statistics. His book is fascinating at times, boring at others, now clear as a summer day, now murky as a winter night. He raises and examines big questions, yet is often at his best evoking small-scale responses to disasters. What justifies the book and makes it valuable is his recurrent insistence that disasters and catastrophes are not just something which happen to us and before which we are powerless, but are often consequences of social and economic development and of political decisions
... a book that hopscotches breezily across continents and centuries while also displaying an impressive command of the latest research in a large number of specialized fields, among them medical history, epidemiology, probability theory, cliodynamics and network theory ... If the book’s vast temporal scope leads it to resemble histories written in earlier times, its drive to pronounce on events in cultures spanning the globe and its heavy reliance on cutting-edge theories makes Doom very much a product of our moment. It belongs on the shelf next to recent ambitious and eclectic books by authors like Jared Diamond, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Steven Pinker. What unites these writers is their disregard for traditional disciplinary boundaries and a determination to reach for synoptic knowledge of stupefyingly complex subjects ... The result, in Ferguson’s case, is a book containing some genuine wisdom, but also some perplexing lacunae ... Ferguson’s own arguably irresponsible actions do not inform his analysis in any notable way ... Reading Doom, it’s hard to escape the impression that responding intelligently to pandemics depends on people in high office being smart enough to listen to Niall Ferguson so they will do a better job of disrupting the behavior of people like Niall Ferguson ... worthwhile points that promise to make a contribution to improving our management of future disasters ... Unfortunately, Ferguson raises doubts about his own judgment by seeming to wave away concerns about climate change — the most widely understood and anticipated catastrophe looming on the horizon ... It is this spirit of aloofness that gives Doom its boyish, winsome energy as it skips along from one historical episode and high-powered theory to the next. But it’s also the source of Ferguson’s unsuitably arch tone as he genially narrates the suffering and deaths of countless millions of souls down through the millenniums ... often insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant. But it’s also a book very taken with its own polymathic virtuosity. That makes it an exemplary artifact of the culture in which it was written — very smart, but not quite as smart as it thinks it is.
Throughout you glimpse Ferguson’s subtlety, eloquence and breadth of scholarship. But the book has a big defect — and not just because instant history is always fraught with danger. No, the problem is that it covers so much ground at such a breathless pace that the moment you hope that you are going to get Ferguson’s reasoned take on an issue, he has already moved on ... Sometimes, covering terrain at speed makes for a thrilling ride; here, you just wish Ferguson would slow down and give us more of his (excellent) analysis ... it is like being caught in an intellectual blizzard ... For me, this is the weakest of Ferguson’s books, not because of a lack of intellectual verve, but because of a strangely disappointing format. It is when this fine historian pauses to give topics the full blowtorch that his analysis penetrates the deepest. The sooner he is back, the better.
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.
Readers...will find two Ferguson on display. Besides the conservative columnist...the serious, if sometimes wrong-headed historian, is also in attendance ... He wants to discuss what lessons to take from how different societies have responded to disasters and how to avoid both 'self-flagellating chaos' and calls for 'totalitarian rule or world government.' Though he hits the first target with reasonable accuracy, he misses the second by an almost comically wide margin ... This is a realist's point of view, in which history still features villains, just more diffuse ones, such as 'bureaucratic sclerosis' ... Much of what Ferguson writes about the COVID pandemic and the modern era would have benefited from a greater distance as it often feels off-the-cuff, churlish, and better suited for a Twitter hot take ... Though never lacking for engaging material...Doom suffers from a lack of focus...glibness...a certain post-9/11 imperial arrogance that clashes with his focus elsewhere on the necessity of clarity and humility ... he should be careful what he wishes for.
... like someone who doesn’t want to let a moment’s research go unused, he crams the book with a dizzying array of theories, characters and references that, while sometimes informative and occasionally amusing, combine to a deadening effect ... In vain does the reader search through Ferguson’s impressive breadth of learning for a compelling structure or argument that might make sense of the information overload. As if to make that job even harder, two-thirds of the way through the book, Ferguson starts writing about contemporary events as they’re unfolding. He acknowledges the limitations of this endeavour, as a historian, but suggests the chapter should be read as a diary...It’s no such thing, but instead an extended piece of opinion journalism that doesn’t really add much to our understanding of the pandemic, while showing that Ferguson is no better at prediction than the scientists he takes to task ... not easy to decipher.
Although the writing is compelling, the sheer range of examples makes it difficult always to hold on to a sense of the overall thesis; each tree is beautifully drawn but this reader at least sometimes struggled to retain a sense of the wood. Forecasting, network science, economics, epidemiology, together with the psychology of leadership are all considered in a dazzlingly broad examination of the 'politics of catastrophe'. Reassuringly, Ferguson concludes that human behaviour does actually matter in determining the impact of disasters, whatever their origins or character. The vulnerability of the system, rather than the weakness of the leadership, is fundamental to Ferguson’s account of how catastrophes unfold ... With his elegant prose style and depth of sources, he provides what must be one of the most detailed, comprehensive and readable accounts of the early months of the pandemic that has been published to date. The vulnerability inherent in our networked world is discussed by Ferguson with an expertise that puts much contemporary comment on Covid to shame ... An early second edition or even simply a postscript would benefit the book ... for all its magisterial reach, Doom is more useful as a warning of past follies than a guide to those that may be coming over the horizon ... The inherent unpredictability of what lies in wait for us all around the next corner means that, notwithstanding Ferguson’s brilliance and breadth of scholarship, this immensely readable book is a better lens than it is a compass.
... reads like an extended version of one of those high-price talks ... If you’ve ever attended a corporate retreat with a 'thought leader' speaker, or listened to enough TED talks online, you know the genre. Weaving together historical examples from across centuries and continents, illuminating statistics, intriguing academic research, and a few pop-culture references, these lectures have the effect of making audiences feel instantly smarter, without troubling them with the kind of soul-searching questions that might ruin a good night’s sleep or the conference cocktail party ... In this fluid yet fleeting manner, Ferguson devotes the first third of his book to analyzing dozens of grand explanations for historical calamity, from religious eschatology to Marxist economics to the more modern innovations of 'chaos theory' and 'cliodynamics,' or the computer-driven attempt to decode historical patterns through massive data crunching. Like a good, Oxford-educated, small 'c' conservative, he finds them all interesting but ultimately wanting in their failure to acknowledge historical unpredictability and the limits of human foresight ... In a neat trick of homage and appropriation, Ferguson zeros in on three trendy disaster metaphors in particular, each coined by a lesser-known big thinker ... Although this history of plagues is insightful, Ferguson’s discussion of the coronavirus itself is unsatisfying — mostly because it’s not yet history ... Despite the pose of scholarly detachment that characterizes most of the book, Ferguson also betrays several striking biases in his closing chapters ... History also offers many examples of the social and economic havoc that can result from such maddening inequality, but those stories may not go over so well with the well-heeled audiences that await Ferguson back on the speaking circuit. Safely vaccinated and wealthier than ever, they’d rather not picture that gray rhino.
... often feels like a special disasters season of University Challenge, in which all the answers are given by an N Ferguson of Stanford University. There are different themes to his chapters, but after a while they all blur. ... After a while I lost the thread of any argument that was connecting these events and decided just to enjoy them ... he butterfly effect flits through, then disappears. The economist Nikolai Kondratieff waves at us and is then shot by Stalin. And what can we derive from it all? Not much other than that the social network of the dinosaurs was ill prepared for the asteroid that wiped them out ... You sense that Ferguson submitted the manuscript last autumn and the desire to get his book out in time for the summer also means that he has to make judgments about the impact of Covid-19 that, frankly, haven’t quite survived the second and third waves of the autumn and winter ... One feature of this book, by the way, is its insistence on settling scores with liberal centrists in the US media and academia who have obviously got up the author’s nose. It is beyond tiresome. Nor do I take much to Black Lives Matter activism being described — along with Bolshevism — as a 'contagion'. There are other places for such culture wars feuding ... This reviewer, however, just has to wonder at how a very clever person can end up in such a very strange place. Long Covid, maybe? Caught on one of those early, reckless trips?
Ferguson’s fifteenth and latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, is meant to set the record straight on the pandemic, rebut the most 'idiotic' arguments made about Covid-19, and situate our year of disastrous living in longer historical perspective ... Clubby and superficial and impressively dull, it feels intended to win over the powerful few, not persuade—or even madden—the many. Arriving at a time of massive wealth concentration and consolidated power, Doom offers a revealing glimpse of how ideas are sold to those with great wealth, tremendous influence, limited curiosity, and a penchant for having their own assumptions assiduously confirmed. More than that: to read Doom is to understand what it looks like when a public thinker truly goes private.
Like [Ferguson's] other works, Doom is well-researched, well-argued, and all-encompassing. Ferguson uses the depth and breadth of his knowledge to cogently argue for a new understanding of catastrophic events ... A book reminiscent of William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, Ferguson’s new title is a much-needed book on an important and pressing subject. Ferguson provides ample support for his arguments, uses an interdisciplinary approach, and offers new insights and revelations. An exemplary and thought-provoking work from a renowned author that will not disappoint.
... [an] assertive, intensely researched, sometimes unconvincing, but always entertaining account ... After a handful of familiar examples (the Titanic, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc.), Ferguson returns to Covid, an ongoing preoccupation that he describes in superb detail ... Captivating, opinionated history from a knowledgeable source.
... scattershot ... Ferguson’s sharp-eyed catastrophe postmortems debunk received wisdom and spotlight delusional responses ... Unfortunately, his own stabs at scientific analysis yield few new insights, and he draws the obvious conclusion that catastrophes are unpredictable and individual leaders usually have little control over them. This colorful catalogue of misfortune and folly brings little clarity to the subject.
