The book’s second chief objective – perhaps more properly, the book’s central point, by its own attestation – is that all catastrophes, whether arising from disease, earthquake, war, or spectacular machine failure, as in the case of space and air calamities, are in some way man-made political disasters. And so far, it would seem, about a year after he hit “print” on his final draft, his predictions have been just about bang on. Most journalists, commentators, and academics would shrink from making such huge prognostications, certainly in book form. Bravely wrapping up his drafts in the Fall of 2020 and publishing in the Spring of 2021, as the COVID calamity was still very rapidly unfolding, Ferguson fearlessly stakes out his views on President Trump’s largely wise decisions of policy and entirely disastrous ones of communication on the many mediocrities and hypocrisies of an American media so enthralled by their orgiastic hatred of Trump that they failed to assign the correct apportionment of blame to the health bureaucracy on the different effects of severe and loose government restrictions on the course of the disease and economy in various countries around the world and, perhaps most boldly, on the likely sum total impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the planet. He undertakes – and succeeds in writing – what will undoubtedly be viewed as the first, dominant historical record of the coronavirus pandemic of 2019. In his new book, DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe, the great Niall Ferguson sets out with what appear to be twin objectives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |