"An important and quite beautiful book". ("Library Journal"). "[Eliade] throws a searching and humbling light on our modern fragmented existence". ([London] "Times Literary Supplement"). "Treatment of such subjects as the meaning of the sacred, sun and moon worship, water symbolism, sacred stones, fertility cults, the earth mother, symbols of regeneration and the myth of eternal renewal, will interest the general reader as well as the scholar". ("New York Times"). "It is doubtful that one could encounter a more impressive work of scholarship and insight...All serious students of religion would derive enormous profit from the reading of this work". ("Kirkus"). In this era of increased knowledge the essence of religious phenomena eludes the psychologists, sociologists, linguists, and other specialists because they do not study it as religious. According to Mircea Eliade, they miss the one irreducible element in religious phenomena - the element of the sacred. Eliade abundantly demonstrates universal religious experience and shows how humanity's effort to live within a sacred sphere has manifested itself in myriad cultures from ancient to modern times; how certain beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths have, with interesting variations, persisted. Mircea Eliade's works include the multivolume "History of Religious Ideas". John C. Holt is a professor of religion at Bowdoin College and the author of "The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art, and Politics of Late Medieval Sri Lanka".

When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book "The Uses of Literacy", Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

本书以反映赵宋王朝文化特色的宋学为核心，探讨了宋学产生的时代背景，宋学发展各阶段的情况等。