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Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée

496 pages
Langue

Anglais
Éditeur

Allen Lane
Date de publication

6 mai 2021
Dimensions

16.2 x 4.3 x 24 cm
ISBN-10

0241488443
ISBN-13

978-0241488447
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Description du produit

Biographie de l'auteur

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower.

Détails sur le produit

Éditeur ‏ : ‎ Allen Lane (6 mai 2021)
Langue ‏ : ‎ Anglais
Relié ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241488443
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241488447
Poids de l'article ‏ : ‎ 720 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.2 x 4.3 x 24 cm

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Niall Ferguson

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4,4 sur 5

840 évaluations

5 étoiles		59%
4 étoiles		24%
3 étoiles		12%
2 étoiles		3%
1 étoile		2%

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ANONYMOUS

sad but true

Commenté en France 🇫🇷 le 25 janvier 2022

Read it carefully. It is filled with useless truth.
No way out. If profets couldn’t help, how could I?
Good bye

Utile

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John Ferngrove

Too soon to tell

Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 1 mars 2021

Commentaire client Vine (Club des Testeurs) sur un produit gratuit( Qu'est-ce que c'est ? )

Niall Ferguson clearly felt a strong compulsion to get busy on this, while he was in lockdown. Inspired by the events of our present pandemic he has gone looking for historical parallels in past contagions, and in human responses to disasters more generally, and what lessons they might have for our present predicament. It is therefore curious to me that he chose to bring the project to completion at a time (Aug 2020) when the full narrative of the virus was yet to be fully disclosed and, in many respects, so much more left to unfold. That is not to say that the book is flawed as such, but from the perspective of Mar 2021 it does feel essentially unfinished. It is a book rich in historical detail but perhaps vague in argument and conclusions drawn. Hence my headline 'too soon to tell'.

The book falls into multiple parts, the first of which forms the bulk of the text with an examination of disasters throughout history, both natural and man-made, some in the deep past, others in more recent memory. Points that are emphasised include that the border line between natural and man-made disasters can often be difficult to draw as political and cultural factors can often determine the impact that even a natural disaster can have and what kind of response can be mounted. Disasters ofetn come in trains, disease and famine following on from and exacerbating war; population declines or migrations leading to political upheaval and so on. A point frequently made, and carried forward to the next section is that while it may seem obvious to lay blame with leaders for failed and botched responses it is more often than not the friction at lower levels of organisational hierarchies where the ultimate causes of such failures lie. He is keen to expose the 'great-man' view of history as untenable one one begins to examine the details.

The next section focusses on humanity's more recent brush with pandemics, looking quite closely at the truly ghastly Spanish Flu pendemic of 1918-20, and the inadequacies of its handling (he makes less of the limitations of medical knowledge at the the time than he might have). He then examines the largely forgotten Asian Flu pandemic of 1957-58 which had a mortality profile very similar to the present Covid outbreak, at least as it stood in Aug, 20, but which predominantly affected the young and fit, thus having a higher impact on total years of life lost. At this time the US just got on with it, 'took it on the chin', and made almost no efforts towards quarantine and distancing intervention patterns. Fascinatingly, an irascible chap called Maurice Hilleman developed a vaccine. It was only 40% effective and arrived too late to be of help, but he went on to develop nine of the standard childhood vaccinations that we routinely administer to this day.

Then we come to a couple of chapters on the present Covid-19 experience. This is packed with seemingly endless details of newspaper articles, op eds, scientific papers, congressional findings, from the both sides of the lives saved vs. economic disruption divide. This all makes for a voluminous bibliography, and for anyone wanting to really sink themselves into the details for the rest of their lives they would be more than able to. Economist that Ferguson is he makes the point that using the typical actuarial value of a human life being worth ~ $10,000,000 then the equation of lives saved versus economic chaos and costs of mitigation measures rendered the earliest lockdown a mistake, at least in dollar terms. Of course, subsequent developments may well have rebalanced that equation to something more evenly decided. He seems motivated to moderate the popular blame of leaders, Trump and Johnson, both being heads of states that should have performed better in the crisis, given techical capabilities. Again it is friction down at the level of state/federal interactions in the US where the innumerable small failures in response accummulate. For the UK, he accuses Chris Witty of prevarication on lockdown and quarantine of air travel, with Dominic Cummings being the one to force the decisive response, pretty much the precise opposite of what I would have expected. So, in this section we get a blizzard of facts, opinions, contradictory studies and no chance of any proper clarity being achieved until we eventuyally arrive at a place with effective vaccines and the hi-tech variant detection programs which have suddenly arrived to replace an absurdly and possibly criminally bungled testing program with the sequencing technology with which the UK really was an established world leader. A long term consequence of its enforced leadership in the human genome project. Any conclusions as to who was to be held accountable; who should have known what was to be done, now lost down among the ranks of faceless and unaccountable civil servants, buried in the bowels of White Hall.

Lastly, a brief set of speculations on future possible tragedies and likelihoods of adequate responses completes the book. This rapidly takes a left hand turn into post-Covid territory such that we are focussed now pretty much on China's great power strategy for its region, and the south China Sea, more generally. This section does become a little spine chilling. I myself have ny own concerns about China's super-power ambitions and about how quickly a new Cold War could turn hot. While it has long been clear that China's, indeed Xi Jinping's, most cherished foreign policy goal is the restoration of Tawain, with Tonkin and Annam Vietnam a secondary objectice, I find myself looking at developments in the South Eastern Asian region with a new and more jaundiced eye. The present instability in Myanmar/Burma of a ruthless regime that has got itself into debt entrapment with Chinese companies starts to seem like just the place that a nakedly agressive China migt pick to send signals of a new reality to the region and the wider world. It seems somehow that discussion here has drifted towards the possibility of a rather different type of disaster of the human deliberate variety. One that could put Covid into a rather more constrained perspective.

Lots to think about but leaves you to form your own conclusions.

60 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Ricky

History in a time of propaganda

Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 20 mai 2021

Niall Ferguson is one of my favourite historians. He presents here a compelling and well-argued account of the many ‘doomsday’ scenarios that have visited humankind. He challenges the idea that some are purely natural catastrophes, such as volcanic eruptions, as some involve man-made disasters such as people building homes near these risky sites.
The incentive behind writing this book has doubtless been the Covid-19 epidemic and he sets out to put it into perspective, while mindful that it is not yet over…always a tricky task for an historian. Nevertheless, he uses the information we have to date to compare its likely trajectory to other pandemics as well as other ‘doom’ scenarios such as war and other atrocities.
The book is an intelligent take on a subject that usually requires a calmer consideration than is possible in current times. Whilst he does the historical account very well, the same cannot be said of him turning his considerable skills to the present. We live in very turbulent times, with propaganda masquerading as news, censorship instead of debate and moral proclamations producing hysterical and often non-rational judgements. It is simply impossible to produce a calm, measured and balanced conclusion about this pandemic, since there are many factual and counterfactual arguments and a dearth of agreed facts.
I recommend this book for its historical accuracy and attempt to present a measured perspective on the likely death toll. However, as he says himself, the breakdown of societal networks will have a much longer effect if and when the virus vanishes. We are living through anxious and dangerous times, since there are forces at work that seek to change the nature of Western society and possibly the world itself. This is where Niall Ferguson’s analysis breaks down in my opinion, since his bias starts to show through. He is clearly not a fan of the populist movement, nor President Trump. Yet, he fails to remain impartial and Fox News is mentioned several times as if propaganda is limited to their output. The elitists at Davos are shown as myopic in their quest for a Green economy, but the UN Agenda 21 and ‘The Great Reset’ project by the World Economic Forum escape similar scrutiny.
For his brave attempt to describe the historical Doom scenarios and compare them to the present day pandemic, I give this book 4 stars.

17 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Stephen Black

Vague Vague Vague !!

Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 8 mai 2021

This is written far too early to extrapolate this vague thesis to the current situation. A previous reviewer has correctly concluded that the anti Chinese missive is tiresome but it is in keeping with the authors political world view. Am afraid I find Professor Ferguson rather tedious. Not recommended !!

15 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Alexandra

Cassandra and Moral Scars

Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 17 juillet 2021

Niall Ferguson’s new book exposes humanities obsession with calamity. Many believe that they are Cassandra, alone in their ability to predict the future while everyone else is too ignorant to listen to the plight. It is a cycle which never ceases to captivate the human mind. For some it boarders a fetish, “we were wrong today, but we’ll be right eventually”.

It is Ferguson’s triumph in this book that he does not fall in wholeheartedly with either the Covid Calamity Predictors or the Anti-Vaxx Loons.

Despite being released at the perfect time to be one, this is not a work exclusively about COVID-19 or pandemics (though they both unavoidably appear). Instead this is a work about catastrophes and the effects they have on our public/private spheres, and the scars they leave upon our mortal conscious.

We live in a time when the coronavirus pandemic is yet to pass. Thus any attempts to pen its course in a meaningful manner - which will stand the test of time - is futile, and (for now) a waste of effort. As Ferguson puts it: ‘To write a history of a disaster that is not yet over is, on the face of it, impossible’. It perhaps says something about our ‘next day delivery’ society that there is an immediate market for such a work. However she was bound to rear her head at some point and Corona struts onto the center stage as the star of this works finale. I comforted myself in the knowledge that at least someone of sense was cataloguing these events. I am thus reluctant to judge this book wholly, including its final chapters. On the surface it seems sensible and its verdicts sound. But there are many developments yet to come which none of us can foresee. Who am I to judge, for who am I to know?

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

David Ashforth

How politicians have always got it wrong.

Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 12 octobre 2021

Niall Ferguson is brilliant in describing how politicians from classical days until now produce and impose policies which turn out to be disasters.

When he comes to consider what political policies might be tried in the future and how they would fare he abruptly drops his analysis of actual present or proposed policies and instead spends the last quarter of his book analysing the plots of futuristic novels as though they were reliable reports from the future.

The book describing how the interaction of present world political policies and popular movements might work out remains to be written.