The 547 Buddhist jatakas, or verse parables, recount the Buddha’s lives in previous incarnations. In his penultimate and most famous incarnation, he appears as the Prince Vessantara, perfecting the virtue of generosity by giving away all his possessions, his wife, and his children to the beggar Jujaka. Taking an anthropological approach to this two-thousand-year-old morality tale, Katherine A. Bowie highlights significant local variations in its interpretations and public performances across three regions of Thailand over 150 years.
The Vessantara Jataka has served both monastic and royal interests, encouraging parents to give their sons to religious orders and intimating that kings are future Buddhas. But, as Bowie shows, characterizations of the beggar Jujaka in various regions and eras have also brought ribald humor and sly antiroyalist themes to the story. Historically, these subversive performances appealed to popular audiences even as they worried the conservative Bangkok court. The monarchy sporadically sought to suppress the comedic recitations. As Thailand has changed from a feudal to a capitalist society, this famous story about giving away possessions is paradoxically being employed to promote tourism and wealth.

《国际关系学理论与方法》全面系统地介绍和分析了国际关系学科范围内的主要理论和方法，内容通俗，观点新颖，并配合有网站即时更新资料和专家讲解，因而受到全世界国际关系学学习者的欢迎。牛津大学出版社将此书先后重版三次。作为全世界最好的国际关系学入门教材。相信它不仅适合于高校的学习和研究者，也会使那些议论、阅读和钟爱国际政治的人受益。

Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History has been acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of modern scholarship. A ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations, it is a work of breath-taking breadth and vision. D.C. Somervell's abridgement, in two volumes, of this magnificent enterprise, preserves the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances, the very words of the original. Originally published in 1947 and 1957, these two volumes are themselves a great historical achievement. Volume 1, which abridges the first six volumes of Toynbee's study, includes the Introduction, The Geneses of Civilizations, and The Disintegrations of Civilizations. Volume 2, an abridgement of Volumes VII-X, includes sections on Universal States, Universal churches, Heroic Ages, Ccontacts Between Civilizations in Space, Contacts Between Civilizations in Time, Law and Freedom in History, The Prospects of the Western Civilization, and the Conclusion. Of Somervell's work, Toynbee wrote, "The reader now has at his command a uniform abridgement of the whole book, made by a clear mind that has not only mastered the contents but has entered into the writer's outlook and purpose."

Theory of International Politics is a 1979 international relations theory book, written by Kenneth Waltz that elaborated a new theory, the neorealist theory of international relations, and surpassed the cognitive limitations of the past. Taking into account the influence of neoclassical economic theory, Waltz argued that the fundamental "ordering principle" (p. 88) of the international political system is anarchy, which is defined by the presence of "functionally undifferentiated" (p. 97) individual state actors lacking "relations of super- and subordination" (p. 88) that are distinguished only by their varying capabilities.

In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism's basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing one-self for the state - a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab's introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt's intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by Tracy B. Strong placing Schmitt's work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt's 1929 lecture "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations," which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update of a modern classic, "The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition" belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy.

Class-tested and coherent, this groundbreaking new textbook teaches classic web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. Written from a computer science perspective by three leading experts in the field, it gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Although originally designed as the primary text for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course in information retrieval, the book will also create a buzz for researchers and professionals alike.
Contents
1. Information retrieval using the Boolean model; 2. The dictionary and postings lists; 3. Tolerant retrieval; 4. Index construction; 5. Index compression; 6. Scoring and term weighting; 7. Vector space retrieval; 8. Evaluation in information retrieval; 9. Relevance feedback and query expansion; 10. XML retrieval; 11. Probabilistic information retrieval; 12. Language models for information retrieval; 13. Text classification and Naive Bayes; 14. Vector space classification; 15. Support vector machines and kernel functions; 16. Flat clustering; 17. Hierarchical clustering; 18. Dimensionality reduction and latent semantic indexing; 19. Web search basics; 20. Web crawling and indexes; 21. Link analysis.
Reviews
“This is the first book that gives you a complete picture of the complications that arise in building a modern web-scale search engine. You'll learn about ranking SVMs, XML, DNS, and LSI. You'll discover the seedy underworld of spam, cloaking, and doorway pages. You'll see how MapReduce and other approaches to parallelism allow us to go beyond megabytes and to efficiently manage petabytes." -Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.
"Introduction to Information Retrieval is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and well-written introduction to an increasingly important and rapidly growing area of computer science. Finally, there is a high-quality textbook for an area that was desperately in need of one." -Raymond J. Mooney, Professor of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin
“Through compelling exposition and choice of topics, the authors vividly convey both the fundamental ideas and the rapidly expanding reach of information retrieval as a field.” -Jon Kleinberg, Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University

封面图片为英国伯明翰塞尔福瑞吉百货大楼，其极具线条感的轮廓外型优美，犹如水波的流动。其外表悬挂了1.5万个铝碟，创造出一种极具现代气息的纹理装饰效果，有如夜空下水流的波光粼粼，闪烁于月光之下，使建筑的商业氛围表现到极致。设计该建筑的英国“未来系统建筑事物所”，将商场内部围合成一个顶部采光的中庭，配以交叉的自动扶梯，使购物环境呈现出一种凝聚的向心力和商业广告的展示效应。作为英国第二商业城市伯明翰的建筑地标，人们称该建筑为“未来的百货商店”。因其设计构思的前卫性，该建筑获得2004年英国皇家建筑学会的“建筑设计奖”和2004年“英国皇家工艺美术委员会奖”等多个奖项。
本书从计算机科学领域的角度出发，介绍了信息检索的基础知识，并对当前信息检索的发展做了回顾，重点介绍了搜索引擎的核心技术，如文档分类和文档聚类问题，以及机器学习和数值计算方法。书中所有重要的思想都用示例进行了解释，生动形象，引人入胜，实现了理论与实战的完美结合。
本书的三位作者均是信息检索领域的顶级专家，两位来自学术教育界，一位来自硅谷业界，使本书既具备深厚的理论基础，又代表了尖端科技水准。因此，该书甫一出版，即被奉为该领域的权威著作，备受瞩目。目前已被众多世界名校采用为信息检索课程的教材。