Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why?

While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic and more "antifragile" if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline.

© Niall Ferguson 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • Magisterial reach … immensely readable … Ferguson [applies] his prodigious intellect to placing the present pandemic on a wider historic canvas.

    Financial Times

  • This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. Niall Ferguson’s Doom looks at each of these aspects, putting them into historical perspective in a book of dazzling range and rigour.

    The Spectator

  • Niall Ferguson’s Doom is often insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant.

    New York Times

  • A superb history of the lost art of handling a crisis.

    The Telegraph

  • Stimulating … Each chapter of this thought-provoking book is worth reading for the ideas, perceptiveness and well-told stories of landmark events … It’s a useful reminder that what may feel like having unprecedented restrictions imposed on our lives today is nothing new… readers will find much to relish.

    Evening Standard

  • Elegant, pacey, gripping … a wealth of deep research.

    The Economist

More from the same

Author

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.