A review by ms_greenwitch
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson

2.0

I listened to this book because Stephenson mentioned it as being an influence on Termination Shock at a talk I attended. It was rather a slog to get through, largely because it tried to cover too much ground and included too many lists of statistics and obscure names. It felt like he wanted to write a book about the pandemic, but because the pandemic was still underway at the time of writing, he felt like he needed to broaden his topic. So, he threw in discussions of war, political unrest, etc ranging back hundreds of years. Better to read a few books that focus on just one of these topics than to try to battle through this lengthy survey.