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Curve-fitting is the unavoidable bane of anyone with high convictions. Niall Fergusson falls prey to this spectacularly in Doom in trying to accommodate Covid-19 events to his previously crafted narratives on historic trends. Unfortunately for the author, many Covid affairs have unfolded differently within a few months of the book's publication. If the author were to revise the book to include the new events, he would surely find ways to fit the new events too in agreement with his pre-formed vi...
The eminent historian Niall Ferguson has delivered a formidable tract on the "general history of catastrophe," Doom. Ferguson's scope includes both natural and man-made disasters, which also enables one of the work's animating claims: even natural calamities tend to have elements of human or social failure that enable or propagate them.Ferguson invests usefully in totaling the carnage of history's major catastrophes, highlighting how wars and pandemics have unquestionably had the most deleteriou...
Yes, as other reviewers are saying, this is a hastily thrown together mashup loosely tied around the theme of mankind's disasters - manmade and natural.The first few chapters read like a freshman's attempt at a 'paper' that is really just a mashed up wikipedia-fest.As he gets on to the various forms of plague it gets more interesting. NF is clearly quite a formidable historian, and he does a good job of being informative (I did not know that half of Napoleon's Grand Army that went into Russia di...
“Doom” by Niall Ferguson is analogous to a hastily and haphazardly whipped up world encyclopedia. While the reader is treated to an extraordinary variety of incredible information, she is also plagued by data fatigue. This feature of death by data detracts, from the original essence of the book, which in itself is extremely engrossing and absorbing. Ferguson, a Scottish historian and the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, claims that most of the disast...
“We are all doomed.” That’s basically how Niall Ferguson starts the first chapter of his latest book to emphasise the inevitability of death. As suggested by the four horsemen of the Book of Revelation—Conquest, War, Famine, and the pale rider Death—, it looks highly unlikely that disasters could be predicted and much less avoided. According to Ferguson, in every disaster, there will always be a Cassandra figure who prophesied the upcoming catastrophe, much as the real Cassandra warned the peopl...
Niall Ferguson, as I noted a few years ago in my review of The Great Derangement, seems to consist of two or more authorial personas. Having now read Doom, his most recent book, I can confirm and expand this observation. Ferguson indeed has multiple authorial personalities, and I believe that he gives voice to most of them in this book. (Although it's thoroughly footnoted and referenced, I find the archive-digging, monograph-writing historian is the missing persona in this book). But we do exper...
While the rest of us spent lockdown learning to bake sourdough, Niall Ferguson applied his intellect to the task of placing the pandemic in historical context. In Doom, the Scottish-born Harvard historian sets out to understand why humanity, time and again through the ages, has failed to prepare for catastrophe. There’s no doubt that Ferguson's inquiry is dazzlingly broad, covering a host of natural and man-made disasters. He mixes Vesuvius, wars, famine, Chernobyl with a variety of disciplines....
Niall Ferguson has a remarkable ability to take a complex subject and explain it clearly. In this case he deals with how we deal with catastrophes. Not surprisingly he spends a lot of time on pandemics including the 1918, 1957 and Covid events. But he also deals with polio and even some events which are not disease related. This book is full of revelations.For example, the "Spanish" flu pandemic in 1918 actually can be traced to Fort Riley Kansas - but the Spanish newspapers were more than ready...
Ferguson seems more concerned about showing off how much he knows than he does about getting his actual point across. This book feels to me like the encyclopedic ramblings of a self-important man who’s been cooped up in quarantine for too long. I’m 109 pages in and have lost faith that the rest of the book will be worth the time.
Another stimulating and insightful read from Prof. Ferguson. While it's a challenge to write about the COVID pandemic while we are still in the midst of it, his comments and insights are not aimed towards predicting how it will develop and end, but rather on how people (collectively and individually) respond to disasters and catastrophes - including how they are not avoided, and even made worst, by group dynamics, politics, and other impersonal and personal forces. This is the 10th book from Fer...
“All disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens.“ Discuss. In Doom, Niall Ferguson roams the world, history and even science fiction to examine disasters. There is no shortage holding him back. Too often, he finds midlevel managers at fault.The disasters he investigates cover the spectrum from war to pathogens, floods, earthquakes and in the end, planetary invasions. It is an education, a peek behind the scenes, a rollercoaster and an argu...
A lengthy historical examination of the political drivers of Catastrophe (natural and man-made : one of the author’s key points is that even naturally arising catastrophes are man-made in their severity) – one which is never entirely dis-interesting in the issues it discusses and arguments it advances but is also never really coherent in pulling those issues and arguments together. There are two comments pertinent to the writing and presentation of this book.Firstly it made use of extensive sour...
Ferguson is so dang smart and interesting that it frightens me. This is a short history of disaster. So yeah. I’m in. Of course.Ferguson makes the point that all disasters are man-made. In other words, earthquakes are only disasters because people build stuff like skyscrapers and nuclear power plants on fault lines.Otherwise it would just be a rumble in nothingness. After a bit of theory, Ferguson takes us on a historical misery tour of plague, famine, war, and sundry such.The back nine of the b...
An ambitious historical survey that falls prey to Ferguson's penchant for contrarian carping.My full review is at PopMatters.
COVID's rampage across the globe has changed everything. We all know it, we all sense it, and to some degree, we see it. But how much? How permanent will those changes be? And what does it it say about our collective fear of catastrophe striking us out of the blue? Niall Ferguson has written a fascinating study on the general theory of disasters throughout history, showing why we seem to never really learn from them. Indeed, as Ferguson points out, we actually seem to be getting worse at dealing...
Feels like reading thousands of tidbits from a thousand Wikipedia pages. No wonder there's 62 pages of reference. Ferguson obviously knows a lot and likes to show it, but he would be more interesting in a quiz show in common knowledge than as a writer. "Doom" presents theory after theory about anything without linking any of them together in a coherent way.
A bit macabre, a bit dismissive, Niall Ferguson's upcoming history of catastrophe alternates between fascinating and a little too disconnected from reality, where frontline workers have boots on the ground. Essentially, everything but the sections actually dealing with COVID are excellent, well-realized, and highly interesting accounts of different disasters, the context in which they became all too possible, and the series of actors that played important roles, big and small. Meanwhile, the COV...
Niall Ferguson clearly felt a strong compulsion to get busy on this, while he was in lockdown. Inspired by the events of our present pandemic he has gone looking for historical parallels in past contagions, and in human responses to disasters more generally, and what lessons they might have for our present predicament. It is therefore curious to me that he chose to bring the project to completion at a time (Aug 2020) when the full narrative of the virus was yet to be fully disclosed and, in many...
Doom went to press in the late summer or early fall of 2020, because of this their analysis of the American election or COVID-19 is of limited value...though interesting. On occasion, the sheer weight of detail is distracting. Otherwise, the book is a brilliant analysis of natural and manmade disasters and their outcomes. Definitely worth a read. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
A better title would be: 'Brief Discussions of Some Catastrophes Throughout European History, and Three Chapters Summarising the COVID-19 Pandemic'.The first of these two main sections (the discussions of historical catastrophes) was certainly interesting, and I enjoyed learning more about the Black Death, Spanish Flu, etc., but it didn't provide much in the way of historical analysis. If we're here to learn about the Politics of Catastrophe, I would expect that we would be seeing some historica...