A sweeping cultural survey reminiscent of Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence . "At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them.' So begins Charles Murray's unique account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Employing techniques that historians have developed over the last century but that have rarely been applied to books written for the general public, Murray compiles inventories of the people who have been essential to the stories of literature, music, art, philosophy, and the sciences—a total of 4,002 men and women from around the world, ranked according to their eminence. The heart of Human Accomplishment is a series of enthralling descriptive chapters: on the giants in the arts and what sets them apart from the merely great; on the differences between great achievement in the arts and in the sciences; on the meta-inventions, 14 crucial leaps in human capacity to create great art and science; and on the patterns and trajectories of accomplishment across time and geography. Straightforwardly and undogmatically, Charles Murray takes on some controversial questions. Why has accomplishment been so concentrated in Europe? Among men? Since 1400? He presents evidence that the rate of great accomplishment has been declining in the last century, asks what it means, and offers a rich framework for thinking about the conditions under which the human spirit has expressed itself most gloriously. Eye-opening and humbling, Human Accomplishment is a fascinating work that describes what humans at their best can achieve, provides tools for exploring its wellsprings, and celebrates the continuing common quest of humans everywhere to discover truths, create beauty, and apprehend the good.

哭泣是人类共有的情绪，哭泣是人类独有的行为。但我们却对哭泣知之甚少，除了知道女人通常比男人哭得多，婴儿比成人哭得更多，除此之外，几乎一无所知。在哭泣者眼中理所当然的理由，在安抚者看来，却是莫名其妙。通过本书，读者将会理解什么是欢愉之泪，什么是虚构的眼泪，以及男人、女人、婴儿和孩童之泪的含义。 本书描绘各种艺术和科学学说对眼泪的理解，并将彰显各个观点的价值，说明其历史及其缺失。

本书重点写了大收藏家佩皮斯、杰弗逊、约翰·索恩爵士、托马斯·比维克，还有邓尼斯·希利和埃德娜·希利夫妇的图书收藏和阅读的历史，有力地展现了这五百年丰富多彩的图书收藏历史。同时，也提到了十八世纪英国咖啡屋广布的重要性，法兰克福书展的十六世纪起源到二十世纪纸皮本和书店连锁的革命等问题。另配有94幅插图。

《中国近代文化史》主要介绍了传统与求变、中西体用之间、戊戌新文化、清末十年的文化变局、五四新文化运动等。中国近代文化史是研究中国自近代以来文化的发展和演变规律的专门史。《中国近代文化史》适合对历史文化史感兴趣的读者阅读。

This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution - understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations - was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power. The larger context for this study is the 'rural-urban divide': the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.