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 W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space
1st Edition
By Andreas Mebert, Stephanie Lowe
July 20, 2017
In Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne tackle the central problem facing all businesses: how to perform better than your competitors? Their solution involves taking a creative approach to the normal view of competition. In the normal framework, competition is a zero-sum game: if ...
An Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk
1st Edition
By Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
W.E.B Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk is a seminal work in the field of sociology, a classic of American literature – and a solid example of carefully-structured reasoning. One of the most important texts ever written on racism and black identity in America, the work contains powerful arguments ...
An Analysis of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
1st Edition
By Cheryl Hudson
July 20, 2017
What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier – and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result of William Cronon asking and answering those questions, and the work can ...
An Analysis of William James's The Principles of Psychology
1st Edition
By The Macat Team
July 20, 2017
The impact of William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology is such that he is commonly known as the father of his subject. Though psychology itself is a very different discipline in the 21st-century, James’s influence continues to be felt – both within the field and beyond. At base, Principles...
An Analysis of Zora Heale Hurston's Characteristics of Negro Expression
1st Edition
By Mercedes Aguirre, Benjamin Lempert
July 20, 2017
A critical analysis of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston' 1934 essay Characteristics of Negro Expression: A crushing evaluation of the many racial prejudices of 1930s America, including a common presumption that African American art was unoriginal – ...
An Analysis of C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination
1st Edition
By Ismael Puga, Robert Easthope
July 13, 2017
C. Wright Mills’s 1959 book The Sociological Imagination is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of post-war sociology. At its heart, the work is a closely reasoned argument about the nature and aims of sociology, one that sets out a manifesto and roadmap for the field. Its wide ...
An Analysis of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
1st Edition
By Harman Bhogal, Liam Haydon
July 13, 2017
Few works of history have succeeded so completely in forcing their readers to take a fresh look at the evidence as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down – and that achievement is rooted firmly in Hill's exceptional problem-solving skills. Traditional interpretations of the English Civil ...
An Analysis of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
1st Edition
By David Linden, Nick Broten
July 13, 2017
Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 Road to Serfdom is a classic of conservative economic argument. While undeniably a product of a specific time in global politics – which saw the threat of fascism from Nazi Germany and its allies beguilingly answered by the promises of socialism – Hayek’s carefully ...
An Analysis of Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective
1st Edition
By Sulaiman Hakemy
July 13, 2017
South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang used his 2003 work Kicking Away The Ladder to challenge the central orthodoxies of development economics, using his creative thinking skills to shine new light on an old topic. Creative thinkers are often distinguished by their willingness to challenge received...
An Analysis of Jay MacLeod's Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low Income Neighborhood
1st Edition
By Anna Seiferle-Valencia
July 13, 2017
Why is it that children from disadvantaged backgrounds find it so difficult – and often impossible – to achieve? Few questions are of such fundamental importance to the functioning of a fair and effective society than this one, yet the academic and political narratives that exist to explain the ...
An Analysis of Karen Z. Ho's Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
1st Edition
By Rodolfo Maggio
July 13, 2017
Liquidated is a work of anthropology that treats an unusual, despised subculture – that of the Wall Street banker – much as anthropologists have traditionally treated remote ‘savage’ tribes. But using the techniques of ethnography, including interviews, analysis of daily lives, and fieldwork to ...
An Analysis of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom
1st Edition
By Sulaiman Hakemy
July 13, 2017
Milton Friedman was arguably the single most influential economist of the 20th-century. His influence, particularly on conservative politics in America and Great Britain, substantially helped – as both supporters and critics agree – to shape the global economy as it is today. Capitalism and ...