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Famous as an accomplished poet, T. S. Eliot was also the author of some highly important literary criticism. First published in 1920, The Sacred Wood collects 13 of Eliot's early critical essays. He intended them to be a statement of his principles for literary achievement. These concepts-and the works that Eliot wrote after setting out his principles-inspired many major poets of the twentieth century. Some wanted to imitate him, while many others...
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David Graeber's 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years seeks to overturn hundreds of years of economic theory, specifically the idea that people have a natural inclination to trade with each other, and that the concept of money developed spontaneously to overcome the inefficiencies of a bartering system. The US-born social activist uses his training as an anthropologist to trace the history of money and of debt, and reaches the conclusion that money...
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Europeans once thought all swans were white. "White" was part of how they defined "swan." Then black swans were discovered, and the definition changed forever.
In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the Black Swans of his title can appear at any time, in the form of financial crises, wars, and other unexpected events that have profound, irreversible consequences. Taleb draws on philosophy, mathematics, economics, and other disciplines...
4) A Macat Analysis of Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees's Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Huma
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First published in 1996, Our Ecological Footprint sets out a powerful model for visualizing and measuring humanity's impact on the Earth-the ecological footprint-with the aim of reducing the harm we are causing the planet before it is too late. Although numerous organizations, governments, and individuals worldwide have now adopted the concept of ecological footprinting, the idea has also proved to be controversial. The authors sound a clear warning...
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First published in 1973, Albert Bandura's Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis is a groundbreaking work that helped lay the foundations of the discipline of social psychology. Much of what we now know about the influences of the early childhood environment on delinquency and anti-social behavior can be traced back to Bandura's work. In the book, he uses the subject of aggression to demonstrate and explore the usefulness of what is called social...
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Published in 1961, the year of Frantz Fanon's death, The Wretched of the Earth is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence.
The book rejects colonial assumptions that the people of colonized countries need to be guided by their European colonizers because they are somehow less evolved or civilized. Fanon argues that violence is justified to purge colonialism not...
7) A Macat Analysis of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color
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The United States has the world's largest prison population, with more than two million behind bars. Civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander says this is mainly due to the American government's "war on drugs," launched in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan. In 2010's The New Jim Crow, Alexander explains how this government initiative led to America's black citizens being imprisoned on a colossal scale. She compares this mass detention-with black men...
8) A Macat Analysis of Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Fran
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The modern world has been marked by a series of immense social revolutions that have transformed the states where they happened. In 1979, American sociologist Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions and examined three of these uprisings: in France at the end of the eighteenth century, then in Russia and in China in the first half of the twentieth century. She pinpointed a number of common factors that affected each of these countries...
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How many books can claim to be so influential as to inspire the development of a whole school of thought? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's Metaphysics did exactly that, laying the foundations for a new branch of philosophy-metaphysics-concerned with the cause and nature of being.
Aristotle questioned his teacher Plato's renowned Theory of Forms. Plato argued that everything in the world is nothing more than an imperfect representation of...
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Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War is generally acknowledged as the first great work in the fields of both history and political theory. It uses a combination of narrative, debate, and analysis to document the war between Athens and Sparta (431—404 b.c.). But the importance of the work lies less in the story, than in the way Thucydides tells it. History was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine...
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English scientist James E. Lovelock wrote Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth for the general public, not for scientists. Scientists read it anyway, and rejected it, likely in part for its unapologetic use of mythological imagery.
But there is a lot of science in this 1979 work. Lovelock says the Earth (Gaia) is a superorganism, made up of all living things, interacting with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks of the planet. He suggests Gaia...
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First published in Germany in 1980, British historian Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth" is recognized as one of the most important books ever written about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi State. Kershaw wanted to focus on what he called the "history of everyday life," and so investigated the attitude of the German public to Hitler at the time, rather than looking at the dictator from the perspective of those in positions of power. He was intrigued to find...
13) A Macat Analysis of Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical P
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Since the nineteenth century people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. In his 2003 book Kicking Away the Ladder, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang claims this was not the case and that, in fact, First World economic success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.
Chang's detailed...
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Because the potential returns appear to be greater in poorer countries than in the developed world, modern economic theory implies that rich countries should continually invest in poor countries until returns balance out. In fact, this doesn't happen. Economist Robert E. Lucas Jr. asks why in his groundbreaking 1990 article, "Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?" The question has become known as the Lucas paradox. Lucas analyzes this,...
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Jared M. Diamond clearly identifies five major factors that he says determine the success or failure of all human societies in all periods of history.
Having first asked why societies collapse, Diamond explores various examples of failed societies, from the Norsemen of Scandinavia, who colonized Greenland in the early tenth century, to the eighteenth-century inhabitants of Easter Island. As a counterpoint, he shows how inhabitants of Highland New...
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In his 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, American geography professor and environmental historian Jared Diamond looks to answer the question of why human history unfolded differently on different continents, and why power and wealth became distributed as they are.
Drawing on evidence from a diverse range of disciplines, Diamond argues that the varying rates of human development over the past 13,000 years have had very little to do with genetic superiority....
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Published in 1938, Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James's The Black Jacobins is the little-known story of the only successful slave revolution known in history. It was this 12-year struggle of the African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo that led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804. The uprising was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution that had begun in 1789, just two years before, and in this work James goes...
18) A Macat Analysis of Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the S
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Distinguished British historian Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous seventeenth century, when nations were in the grip of what was known as the General Crisis.
First published in 2013, Global Crisis reveals that freak weather was a key reason why the people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars. Plunging temperatures in the Little Ice Age combined with bad political decisions...
19) A Macat Analysis of Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Mil
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Born in 1945, Paul Kennedy grew up in England, watching the new political realities of the time contribute to the dismantling of the British Empire. He pursued a lifetime of scholarship, predominantly in the US, trying to understand the social, economic, and military forces that shape great powers.
While previous scholars of international history had focused on "great men" and their achievements, Kennedy focused on the interdependent relationship...
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John A. Hobson's 1902 book Imperialism: A Study presents an original and controversial interpretation of the forces that motivated Britain to conquer foreign lands in the eighteenth century. Hobson advances the idea that ultra-wealthy financiers consciously worked to manipulate political leaders, all so they could invest money and sell goods in the outposts of a country's empire. Hobson built his argument on an economic theory he called "underconsumptionism,"...