Book of the week: Doom

The Scottish-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has put the pandemic in the historical context of catastrophes

While the rest of us spent lockdown learning to bake sourdough, Niall Ferguson applied his “prodigious intellect” to the task of placing the pandemic in historical context, said Douglas Alexander in the FT. 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”.

Ferguson’s inquiry is “dazzlingly broad”, covering a host of natural and man-made disasters – Vesuvius, wars, famine, Chernobyl – and takes in disciplines ranging from network science to epidemiology. Insofar as the book has an “overall thesis”, it is that disasters are usually less the product of poor leadership than of “vulnerabilities of the system”. America’s nearly 600,000 Covid deaths, in other words, probably had less to do with Donald Trump than with the country’s cumbersome bureaucracy. Whether you agree with this or not, Ferguson is a superb historian, and Doom is an “immensely readable” book.

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