The really bad news is that, well, it’s not clear what Doom’s message is supposed to be: on the last page I’m as confused as I was halfway through. Falling into precisely the trap outlined for historians prematurely writing the history of the present, he overwhelms his readers in mortality figures, infection rates, policy measures and central bank actions that were outdated when he wrote about them in the fall of 2020-and bordering on irrelevant for the reader in 2021. Still, the pandemic makes an appearance in almost every chapter, and a few chapters toward the end are fully devoted to it.
The good news is that Ferguson’s latest isn’t a history of covid, at least not entirely (he freely admits that it’s much too early to write one). “All disasters,” he writes toward the end of this four hundred–page odyssey of present and historical catastrophes, “are at some level man-made political disasters.” In Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, the prolific author sets out to undermine the distinction between natural disasters and manmade catastrophes. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Niall Ferguson, the celebrated British historian now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has spouted his own version of that age-old riddle.
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