The Macat Library: Great Works for Critical Thinking
About the Book Series
Making the ideas of the world’s great thinkers accessible, affordable, and comprehensible to everybody, everywhere.
With a growing list of over 180 titles across a broad range of subject areas, Macat works with leading academics from the world’s top universities to produce new analyses that focus on the ideas and the impact of the most influential works ever written. By setting them in context – and looking at the influences that shaped their authors, as well as the responses they provoked – Macat encourages readers to look at these classics and game-changers with fresh eyes.
An Analysis of Roland Barthes's Mythologies
1st Edition
By John Gomez
July 20, 2017
Mythologies is a masterpiece of analysis and interpretation. At its heart, Barthes’s collection of essays about the “mythologies” of modern life treats everyday objects and ideas – from professional wrestling, to the Tour de France, to Greta Garbo’s face – as though they are silently putting ...
An Analysis of Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling
1st Edition
By Brittany Pheiffer Noble
July 20, 2017
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s 1843 book Fear and Trembling shows precisely why he is regarded as one of the most significant and creative philosophers of the nineteenth century. Creative thinkers can be many things, but one of their common attributes is an ability to redefine, reframe and...
An Analysis of St. Augustine's Confessions
1st Edition
By Jonathan Teubner
July 20, 2017
St. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most important works in the history of literature and Christian thought. Written around 397, when Augustine was the Christian bishop of Hippo (in modern-day Algeria), the Confessions were designed both to spiritually educate those who already shared ...
An Analysis of St. Benedict's The Rule of St. Benedict
1st Edition
By Benjamin Laird
July 20, 2017
The Rule of St Benedict, written around 1500 years ago by the Italian monk St Benedict of Nursia, is a slim handbook for monastic life – a subject many modern readers would regard as relatively niche. It is, however, also a model of the organized and clearly expressed thought produced by good ...
An Analysis of The Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future
1st Edition
By Ksenia Gerasimova
July 20, 2017
Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland. Also known as The Brundtland Report, it offers a classic approach to problem solving by first asking a productive question. How do we protect the world we ...
An Analysis of Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
1st Edition
By Riley Quinn
July 20, 2017
Many people want to understand what revolutions are and – especially – how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them. But it is arguably the US scholar Theda Skocpol who has done most to create a viable model of ...
An Analysis of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan
1st Edition
By Jeremy Kleidosty, Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy. He remains best remembered for his 1651 treatise on government, Leviathan, a work that shows at the very best the reasoning skills of a deeply original and creative thinker. Creative thinking is all about...
An Analysis of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1st Edition
By Jo Hedesan, Joseph Tendler
July 20, 2017
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be seen, without exaggeration, as a landmark text in intellectual history. In his analysis of shifts in scientific thinking, Kuhn questioned the prevailing view that science was an unbroken progression towards the truth. Progress was ...
An Analysis of Thomas Paine's Common Sense
1st Edition
By Ian Jackson
July 20, 2017
Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history’s most explosive and revolutionary books. A slim pamphlet published at the beginning of the American Revolution, it was so widely read that it remains the all-time best selling book in US history. An impassioned ...
An Analysis of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
1st Edition
By Helen Roche
July 20, 2017
A flagbearer for the increasingly fashionable genre of "transnational history," Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is, first and foremost, a stunning example of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. Snyder's linguistic precocity allows him to cite evidence in 10 languages, putting fresh twists on the...
An Analysis of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
1st Edition
By Karina Jakubowicz, Adam Perchard
July 20, 2017
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation. Interpretation plays a vital role in critical thinking: it focuses on interrogating accepted meanings and laying...
An Analysis of Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
1st Edition
By Simon Young
July 20, 2017
Tony Judt decided to write Postwar in 1989, the year the collapse of the Soviet Union provided European history with a rare example of a clearly-signposted ‘end of an era’. It's scarcely surprising, then, that the great virtue of Judt's book is the clarity and the breadth of its account of postwar...