The problem is that humans are bad at comprehending catastrophe. Doom widens the canvas to a size both awesome and mind-boggling.įor Ferguson, disasters are often tragedies, prophesied by Cassandras who can neither persuade a sceptical chorus nor save the king from doom. His last book, The Tower and the Square (2017), was an eclectic take on how networks shape human civilisations.

Beginning his career as a financial historian, Ferguson has amassed much attention writing sweeping venerations of British imperialism, Western civilisation, and the American empire. The book achieves both more and less than this. Tragedy is neither author’s default genre, which leaves the makings of the pandemic only partially explained.ĭoom is offered as a ‘general history of catastrophe’ that situates ‘our disaster’ in ‘proper perspective’.

But Ferguson, among the world’s most visible and contentious historians, and Lewis, an unrivalled raconteur of Hollywood-ready financial, sporting, and political intrigue ( Moneyball, The Big Short), also deliver well-established tropes and takeaways. Niall Ferguson’s Doom and Michael Lewis’s The Premonition – two chronicles of the pandemic likely to dominate bestseller lists for some time – deal with such tragedy in spades. In this sense, Covid-19 has the makings of a classical tragedy: not mere misfortune but a sequence of unheeded prophecies, unknowing collusion with calamity and disorientation when required to act. Yet come January 2020, authorities worldwide were slow, indecisive, and ill-prepared. SARS, MERS, Ebola, and swine flu were further clues. Science journalists wrote books with titles such as The Coming Plague (Laurie Garrett) and Spillover (David Quammen), whose conclusions were amplified by TED-talking billionaires. For decades, virologists foresaw the coincidence of urbanisation, human proximity with animals, climate change, and globalisation as ideal conditions for spreading deadly pathogens. One of the disconcerting aspects of this pandemic is that there was no shortage of warnings.

The politics of catastrophe