As even casual observers of social media know, takes on any given event now appear as quickly as the events themselves unfold, and self-appointed shapers of public opinion rarely wait for the facts to come in before serving up half-baked views on them. The “historian here!” Twitter thread, in which history professors claim to offer a scholarly perspective on the latest media pseudo-event, became an all-too-familiar genre in the Trump era. The dinosaurlike publishing world, to compete with the digital purveyors of this sort of rapid-fire thinking, must now try to keep up by churning out a steady stream of ephemeral bestsellers.

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In Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, the prolific author and Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson largely avoids the temptations of the popular historian in the digital age. He remains coolheaded and honest about the limitations of his perspective. Ferguson is known for stoking controversy, particularly with his apologias for empire, but Doom steers mostly clear of such provocations. The book is framed partly as a plague diary, conceived, written, and revised over the course of 2020, as the world was succumbing to the pandemic and its social, political, and economic fallout. At the same time, Ferguson contextualizes the crisis in the long history of disasters: not only the plagues that have threatened civilization from the beginning, but a range of other catastrophes, natural (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes) and anthropogenic (wars, financial crashes, nuclear meltdowns), and how different societies have responded to them.