Books in The Great Library series

One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book The Columbian Exchange not only incorporates the results of wide reading in the hard sciences, anthropology and geography, but also stands as one of the foundation stones of the study of environmental history. In this sense, Crosby's defining work is undoubtedly a fine example of the critical thinking skill of creativity; it comes up with new connections that explain the European success in colonizing the New World more as the product of biological catastrophe (in the shape of the introduction of new diseases) than of the actions of men, and posits that the most important consequences were not political – the establishment of new empires – but cultural and culinary; the population of China tripled, for example, as the result of the introduction of new world crops. Few new hypotheses have proved as stimulating or influential.

1986 Chatham River Press, New York; Moss greed cloth boards with faux leather in darker Green along the spine. Gold gilt lettering on the Brown front panel and on the gilt lettering on the spine. Endpapers are decorated and the page edges are also gold gilt. Book includes . Forward by Alix Perry. These works continue to transcend time and place and will compel and delight readers for generations to come.

Library Lost is the sequel to Maya and the Book of Everything and is the second book in the Great Library Series, where two forces, Time and Chaos, battle each other for control of the Great Library, that mysterious place at the center of the universe where all information flows. In the middle of this battle between Time and Chaos is one kid from Earth—Maya Hammond. In Library Lost, Maya is once again on the move, this time with an Apprentice Book named Ariel. Andy, Maya’s traveling companion from the 1970s, is now a grown man with a daughter named Viola. He is also in grave danger. Humphrey, a murderous duke from the planet Ilyria, has come to Earth and is after Andy. Maya warns Andy and befriends Viola. When Maya and Viola are threatened by Humphrey, Ariel takes the two girls to Ilyria, where Maya is reunited with Sir John, Simon, Evangeline, and Duke Owen. From there, the action spirals into chaos and destruction. However, Sydda, the Great Library’s director, has come up with a daring but dangerous plan—Maya must confront Cinnial, who is allied with Chaos and is the leader of a group of adversarial librarians who want to take over the Great Library. But Maya has grave doubts. How can she ever prevail against someone so powerful? How, indeed?

In his wonderfully clear and cogent essay On Liberty, Mill contends that individuals should be as free as possible from interference by government. Proposing that individual fulfilment is the surest route to collective happiness, he argues passionately against the "tyranny of the majority," and sets out to create an alternative view of a practical politics that sets proper limits on the powers of government and society. The result, Mill argues, will be not only greater freedom, but also improved social progress. He reached these conclusions by re-interpreting a large body of existing political and philosophical thought – introducing insights drawn from several different schools of thought, and thereby creating an unparalleled defense of classic liberal principals. Much of the clarity of thought that Mill has become celebrated for is the product of his ability to explain meaning, define terms, and highlight problems and issues of definition – making him an exemplar of high quality interpretive thinking.

Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important. Yet it was the product of an apparently minor, meaningless assignment. Undertaking to approach former classmates who had attended Smith College with her, 10 years after their graduation, the high-achieving Friedan was astonished to discover that the survey she had undertaken for a magazine feature revealed a high proportion of her contemporaries were suffering from a malaise she had thought was unique to her: profound dissatisfaction at the ‘ideal’ lives they had been living as wives, mothers and homemakers. For Friedan, this discovery stimulated a remarkable burst of creative thinking, as she began to connect the elements of her own life together in new ways. The popular idea that men and women were equal, but different – that men found their greatest fulfilment through work, while women were most fulfilled in the home – stood revealed as a fallacy, and the depression and even despair she and so many other women felt as a result was recast not as a failure to adapt to a role that was the truest expression of femininity, but as the natural product of undertaking repetitive, unfulfilling and unremunerated labor. Friedan's seminal expression of these new ideas redefined an issue central to many women's lives so successfully that it fuelled a movement – the ‘second wave’ feminism of the 1960s and 1970s that fundamentally challenged the legal and social framework underpinning an entire society.