Niall Ferguson is working with a bigger hard drive and processor than most any other historian out there. Only 42 years old, Ferguson holds positions at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford’s Hoover Institution (an academic holy trinity) and has 8 books to his credit. They’re typically big books, very big books (though also very readable), that sweep across centuries and continents, and seamlessly weave together theories of politics, economics and empire.
His latest work, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, continues along the same trajectory, but is more daring. It looks to answer a question that is perhaps deceptively simple on the surface. What went wrong with modernity? Why despite so many advances — people living longer, economies growing, etc — was the 20th century the bloodiest of them all? The bloodshed, and particularly the Holocaust, has been traditionally attributed to ideology. But, in a revisionist stroke, Ferguson puts his finger on different causes: ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the jarring decline of empire across the West — something Ferguson has already written a good deal about. The War of the World ranges broadly, taking readers from Germany, to Russian, Japan and Korea, to the Balkans and the Middle East. When you read Ferguson, you get the world - a striking global view that leaves you momentarily thinking that you’ve suddenly got a grip on a very complex world.
Recent interviews and reviews:
Ferguson on NPR - October 19, 2006
Financial Times: Cruel World
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