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Doom
- The Politics of Catastrophe
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
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Civilization
- The West and the Rest
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations.
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Too big to succeed...
- By Count Erklock on 2019-12-27
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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The Square and the Tower
- Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Elliot Hill
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It's about states, armies, and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?
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An amazing read
- By Serguei L. Primak on 2018-04-17
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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The Ascent of Money
- A Financial History of the World
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress.
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Financial literacy for the masses
- By Raven Mad on 2017-12-24
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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Empire
- How Britain Made the Modern World
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red, and Britannia ruled not just the waves but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries.
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A fascinating and well performed audio book.
- By David Selke on 2019-12-26
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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The Great Degeneration
- How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Paul Slack
- Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Best-selling author and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson has won widespread acclaim for thought-provoking works such as Civilization and High Financier. The Great Degeneration tackles nothing less than the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson posits that slowing growth, outrageous debt, and antisocial behavior are contributing to the erosion of the West’s once rock-solid foundations. Ferguson excavates the causes and shows how heroic leadership and radical reform are needed to right the course.
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Solid
- By Anonymous User on 2020-09-18
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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Empire
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's age of empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English language, and the institutions of representative government - all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain's economy, population, and culture from the 17th century until the mid-20th. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.
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great education on British colonialism
- By daniel Froese on 2023-02-03
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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Civilization
- The West and the Rest
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations.
-
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Too big to succeed...
- By Count Erklock on 2019-12-27
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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The Square and the Tower
- Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Elliot Hill
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It's about states, armies, and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?
-
-
An amazing read
- By Serguei L. Primak on 2018-04-17
Written by: Niall Ferguson
-
The Ascent of Money
- A Financial History of the World
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress.
-
-
Financial literacy for the masses
- By Raven Mad on 2017-12-24
Written by: Niall Ferguson
-
Empire
- How Britain Made the Modern World
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red, and Britannia ruled not just the waves but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries.
-
-
A fascinating and well performed audio book.
- By David Selke on 2019-12-26
Written by: Niall Ferguson
-
The Great Degeneration
- How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Paul Slack
- Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Best-selling author and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson has won widespread acclaim for thought-provoking works such as Civilization and High Financier. The Great Degeneration tackles nothing less than the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson posits that slowing growth, outrageous debt, and antisocial behavior are contributing to the erosion of the West’s once rock-solid foundations. Ferguson excavates the causes and shows how heroic leadership and radical reform are needed to right the course.
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Solid
- By Anonymous User on 2020-09-18
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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Empire
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's age of empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English language, and the institutions of representative government - all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain's economy, population, and culture from the 17th century until the mid-20th. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.
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great education on British colonialism
- By daniel Froese on 2023-02-03
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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Abyss
- The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
- Written by: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: John Hopkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation. Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers.
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Excellent book
- By David Brown on 2023-04-12
Written by: Max Hastings
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The Pity of War
- Explaining World War I
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 21 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces.
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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The Earth Transformed
- An Untold History
- Written by: Peter Frankopan
- Narrated by: Peter Frankopan
- Length: 29 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history.
Written by: Peter Frankopan
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The Vision of the Anointed
- Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
- Written by: Thomas Sowell
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mindset behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes, but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts-and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites.
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Essential 2022 reading. all about Trudeau
- By Mike on 2022-07-21
Written by: Thomas Sowell
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The War of the World
- History's Age of Hatred
- Written by: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Abridged
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The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed, for most of its inhabitants, stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead, the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War.
Written by: Niall Ferguson
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The World
- A Family History of Humanity
- Written by: Simon Sebag Montefiore
- Narrated by: Simon Sebag Montefiore, full cast
- Length: 68 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history to the people at the heart of the human drama.
Written by: Simon Sebag Montefiore
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The War on the West
- Written by: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric.
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One of the best audiobooks I've ever purchased
- By Mark on 2022-05-13
Written by: Douglas Murray
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Rigged
- How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
- Written by: Mollie Hemingway
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Railing
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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It was a devastating triple punch. Capping their four-year campaign to destroy the Trump presidency, the media portrayed a Democratic victory as necessary and inevitable. Big Tech, wielding unprecedented powers, vaporized dissent and erased damning reports about the Biden family’s corruption. Rigged is the definitive account of the 2020 election. Based on Mollie Hemingway’s exclusive interviews with campaign officials, reporters, Supreme Court justices, and President Trump himself, it exposes the fraud and cynicism behind the Democrats’ historic power grab.
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The Truth about how Elections are Won (Rigged)
- By Amazon Customer on 2022-08-05
Written by: Mollie Hemingway
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San Fransicko
- Why Progressives Ruin Cities
- Written by: Michael Shellenberger
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse.
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Knowledge Dense
- By Guy Really on 2022-12-03
Written by: Michael Shellenberger
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The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition
- Written by: Daniel N. Robinson, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Daniel N. Robinson
- Length: 30 hrs and 11 mins
- Original Recording
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Grasp the important ideas that have served as the backbone of philosophy across the ages with this extraordinary 60-lecture series. This is your opportunity to explore the enormous range of philosophical perspectives and ponder the most important and enduring of human questions-without spending your life poring over dense philosophical texts.
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Too idiosyncratic for my taste
- By Enrique on 2019-12-08
Written by: Daniel N. Robinson, and others
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Woke Racism
- How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
- Written by: John McWhorter
- Narrated by: John McWhorter
- Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed linguist and award-winning writer John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric.
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Finally some rational thoughts on the state of our media in the world
- By Andrew from saskatoon on 2021-11-24
Written by: John McWhorter
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Napoleon the Great
- Written by: Andrew Roberts
- Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
- Length: 37 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended.
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Bad pronunciations
- By Amazon User on 2018-06-23
Written by: Andrew Roberts
Publisher's Summary
"All disasters are in some sense man-made."
Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters.
Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all.
Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.
In books going back nearly 20 years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation.
Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them.
Doom is the lesson of history that this country - indeed the West as a whole - urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF of images and tables from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
What the critics say
“[Doom] hopscotches breezily across continents and centuries while also displaying an impressive command of the latest research in a large number of specialized fields, among them medical history, epidemiology, probability theory, cliodynamics and network theory.... Belongs on the shelf next to recent ambitious and eclectic books by authors like Jared Diamond, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Steven Pinker.... Promises to make a contribution to improving our management of future disasters.... Insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant.” (New York Times Book Review)
“Doom seeks to understand why humanity, time and again through the ages, has failed to prepare for catastrophes, whether natural or manmade.... Forecasting, network science, economics, epidemiology, together with the psychology of leadership are all considered in a dazzlingly broad examination of the ‘politics of catastrophe’.... Magisterial...[an] immensely readable book.” (The Financial Times)
“Doom covers an impressive sweep of history at a lively narrative clip and weaves a lot of disparate strands together into an engaging picture.” (The Guardian)
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What listeners say about Doom
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- 099880897979
- 2022-09-12
Somewhat underwhelming
The book is a general outline of the history catastrophes alongside some writing on networking, and finished off by predictions of the future and implicit book recommendations.
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- Zuppu
- 2022-09-06
poor volume, I could barely hear.
the post production is terrible. I could barely hear the narrator. otherwise a great book.
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- Amazon Customer
- 2021-08-27
Brilliant
An excellent survey of pandemic problems. A blending of sense with history and literature. Great!
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- DFrost
- 2021-06-16
Disjointed and Rushed
Compared to Ferguson's other books, this one seemed very scattered and poorly thought out. Almost as if it was rushed to shelves to take advantage of a pandemic.
Also, while I share Ferguson's concerns regarding tackling climate change to the exclusion of all other problems, he keeps going after that Thunberg girl, and it is always a bad look when, instead of explaining his concerns, he contents himself to dunk on a little girl, as if she alone is the climate change movement. It's pretty pathetic.
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- Reader
- 2021-05-17
so frustrating but worth the read
Not as well crafted and not nearly as well edited as Ferguson's other books, Doom seems a rush job. Full of excruciating detail and asides.
And yet, interspersed among the roundabouts, some great insights into disaster and especially the response to Covid.
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- David
- 2021-05-23
Get through the first chapters
Get through the first three chapters. The rest is well worth your time. You will not regret the experience
10 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 2021-06-10
Excellent read
Even when the author went on a tangent or down a rabbit hole, I learned something.
7 people found this helpful
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- Scott J. Jones MD
- 2021-10-17
Skip Chapters 9-10
Overall an excellent book, in line with the authors previous works. He truly has a unique ability to take events from history and weave them into an uniquely interlocking and fresh perspective which will often leave you looking at things a little bit differently.
Unfortunately, when he wrote the book in August 2020 most of the information on Covid that was available to the public was either misinformation, politically skewed information, premature information, or flat out lies. I say this as a Stanford trained physician with a college degree in Biochemistry in Molecular biology and research experience in virology. So I know a little bit about the subject. Ferguson was clearly drinking the Kool-Aid in 2020.
So I would strongly suggest you simply skip chapters 9 and 10. They are a waste of your time, since the “facts” cited and Ferguson’s own bias are bewilderingly wrong over and over again.
Other than that, it is an excellent work.
6 people found this helpful
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- ThorJewell
- 2021-06-22
Good report on the work of several others.
This was an excellent report/summary of the points of several works done throughout the recent past. It was nice to be reminded of the points of the researchers/writers/authors of these previous works. However, I got tired of the continued introduction of ideas I had already been introduced to by reading the works myself. I was hoping for more insight from Ferguson himself because I have enjoyed his point of view on several podcasts and cable programs.
5 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 2021-06-09
Historical Context
Ferguson’s “Doom” effectively situates covid 19 amongst other disasters in human history but also shows how a political disaster often develops after a natural one has occurred.
I enjoyed Niall’s review of the events of late 2019-2020 as even though these events where recent, key details could’ve easily been missed in the chaos of living through the pandemic.
Yet sometimes it felt as though the book was too heavily focused on Covid-19. Certainly this event was central to current political discourse but I fear that too many people are likely burned out of the pandemic.
All in all the book is worth a listen especially if you enjoy Ferguson’s work as I do. His unique style weaves popular culture, economics and political analysis into the dissection of historical events providing rich and thought provoking insights.
5 people found this helpful
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- Luanne Marie
- 2021-06-04
How dare you challenge me
Niall,
How dare you challenge my preconceived notions. What give you the right to expand my mind to think about what I was unaware of.
This is agreed book. He has written a comprehensive and fact based argument for understanding the ineptitude and sometimes corrupt leadership. Far from blaming this person or that person, Niall, warns about losing focus on the things that matter.
Thank you Niall Ferguson.
5 people found this helpful
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- John Brynjolfsson
- 2021-08-22
Dozens of historical episodes and vocabulary words on every page!
I’m just now enjoying Niall Ferguson’s “Doom” a thick volume, chock full of historical analysis.
I can’t help but thinking you’d enjoy it.
In particular each page seems to have a dozen or more important historical references, only 20% or 30% of which I had previously heard of.
I therefore enjoy having the gaps in my recollection filled in, and hopefully through assimilation, benefit from learning the new ones that flash by.
Topics range from mathematics, to computer science, to biology, politics, war, statecraft etc.
Listening to it on Audible has the advantage of listening to Naill’s pleasant accent at 1.33x speed. Lots of foreign words properly pronounced!!
Though the book, as title suggests, has a pessimistic tone, it’s hard to argue with the factual accounts, presumably backed up by recorded contemporaneous historical documents. Interpretation on the otherhand of course is subject to some biases, if only to dramatize or to weave a coherent narrative.
One interesting example is history of plagues.
Ferguson the historian, no relation to the famous Epidemiologist of same name, suggests that each medical advance of the Renaissance was greeted in following decades by social adaptation, (basically more densely inhabited cities, and more intercity trade) that used the advantages created by the advances to not just improve health, but to increase the virulence of subsequent plagues…essentially leaving society no better off 50 years later regarding morbidity.
Kind of like economists description of technological advances that don’t result in profits, because all competitors use the same efficiency gains to lower equilibrium prices.
And similar to urban planners dilemma.
In Southern California, I have witnessed, when a traffic jammed freeway is widened, new traffic immediately bottlenecks up again within weeks as new commuters jump on the widened road. And adding insult to injury, new home builders build 100,000 homes in the newly productive ex-urbs enabled by the widened road. The result being urban sprawl.
Anyhow each page seems to have a dozen vocabulary words or historical incidents, 70% which are new to me. That, I think, is indicative of me “learning.” Not a bad thing!
3 people found this helpful
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- BN
- 2021-05-18
I loved it!
Superb and captivating.
Superb in depth, scope, balance & style.
Weakness: probability calc correct, but thin. The underlying "physical" mechanisms of probability distributions can be often known. Hence he could be missing points.
2 people found this helpful
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- Frances J. Freeman
- 2021-12-23
A must read
Few books have ever provided so much new historical information or so many new perspectives on existing knowledge. We all need perspective on the events that have shattered and altered our lives. The organizational structure was questionable, but the content and observations were excellently.
1 person found this helpful
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- DJJ
- 2021-11-26
Guillotine the editor
This is actually one of the worst books I've ever read. He makes absolutely no attempt at any sort of coherent narrative and there isn't really anything to be learned from the book. It's just passing mentions of totally disjointed random bullshit that's vaguely related to the word doom. I quit when he started taking about how airplanes taxiing on a runway one time. The editor should be guillotined. Read 'Collapse of Complex Societies' by Tainter or literally anything else instead of this.
1 person found this helpful