In this path-breaking book, Tong Lam examines the emergence of the “culture of fact” in modern China, showing how elites and intellectuals sought to transform the dynastic empire into a nation-state, thereby ensuring its survival. Lam argues that an epistemological break away from traditional modes of understanding the observable world began around the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the Neo-Confucian school of evidentiary research and the modern departure from it, Lam shows how, through the rise of the social survey, “the fact” became a basic conceptual medium and source of truth. In focusing on China’s social survey movement, A Passion for Facts analyzes how information generated by a range of research practices—census, sociological investigation, and ethnography—was mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation.

当代中国社会从未停止变化，新近在诸多方面的激进变动更是从本质上改变了社会的结构。个体的崛起，就是这样一种转型性的变革。
个体的崛起在很大程度上改变了社会关系的结构，导致了中国社会的个体化。在公共领域，特别是20世纪90年代后期以来城市化背景下的公共领域，个体的角色变得更为复杂和重要。对于当代的中国青年而言，个人幸福和个体自我的实现无疑成为了人生的终极目标。
那么，如何理解正在崛起的个体、及其在中国和世界范围内广泛而深远的影响。根本的问题在于：中国社会，是否像西方社会一样，正在经历一种个体化的进程？
作为一项持续数年的实证合作研究，本书深刻地揭示了：在中国，个人已经成为一个基本社会范畴的事实。中国已经出现了一种发展趋势，并渗透到社会生活的各个方面。这种发展不仅决定了私人领域、家庭结构和两性关系，也决定了经济的组织方式和灵活的就业，以及同样重要的，个人与国家之间的关系。同时，本书也从不同的角度表明，这一中国式的个体化进程具有其独特性，它并非是对欧洲个体化路径的单纯复制。
因此，所有想要了解当今中国社会基本构成——包括其两面性、偶然性和矛盾性等——的读者，都必须读一读此书。

作为1949年以来第一个在中华人民共和国进行精神医学研究的美国学者，凯博文在多层面上探讨了神经衰弱、抑郁症以及躯体症状之间的关系。本书为我们理解中国人在与家庭和国家的关系上的体验开启了一个窗口，同时也对中国人和美国人各自如何解释自身的疼痛与绝望处境进行了一个跨文化的比较。
“本书对疾病症状与社会之间的辩证关系的分析十分具有穿透力。这本强力著作不仅属于人类学与精神医学的先锋之作，而且也展示了作者对消除人类不幸与苦难的深切关注和担当。所有致力于改善健康照顾系统的人都应该阅读本书。”
——Joan M. Anderson, Current Anthropology
“此书堪称医学人类学界长期以来所期盼的最重要的一本著作。”
——Richard Shweder, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
“一本视野宽广、发人深省的医学人类学著作。”
——Roy Porter, Times Literary Supplement
“对跨文化精神医学具有重要贡献。”
——Paul Chodoff, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association
“本书的田野研究写作精美，以至于历史学家都不断被其描述的中国共产主义政治实践中的那些重要时刻所吸引。作者以丰富细腻的笔触描写了中国人的社会关系，童年以及成长过程中出现的那些问题。”
——Jonathan Spence, Yale University
“这是到目前为止我们对中国精神健康问题的最好的研究。这是一本具有开创意义的著作。”
——Ezra F. Vogel, Harvard University

一位越战英雄，在离开战场三十年后，家庭圆满、事业有成，却为何自责悔恨、郁郁而终？
一位在非洲从事人道救援的年轻女性，在经历战乱、腐败、贫穷和疾病的威胁后，为何仍能鼓足勇气，继续艰难的奉献工作？
一位在文革时期被好友出卖、受尽磨难的医生，当有机会复仇时，为何会选择将手中的刀剑轻轻放下？
美国知名人类学家和精神病医师阿瑟•克莱曼，费时数年对这些“苦难经验”细致观察和体验，并以深刻的洞察力揭示了，勇敢面对生活中的危机和无常，并超越地方性价值观所带来的的限制，才是真正重要的事。

All too often anthropologists and other social scientists go into the field with unrealistic expectations. Different cultural milieus are prime ground for misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and interrelational problems. This book is an excellent introduction to real-world ethnography, using familiar and not-so-familiar cultures as cases. The book covers participant observation and ethnographic interviewing, both short and long term. These methodologies are open to problems such as lack of communication, depression, hostility, danger, and moral and ethical dilemmas -- problems that are usually sanitized for publication and ignored in the curriculum. Among the intriguing topics covered are sexualized and violent environments, secrecy and disclosure, multiple roles and allegiances, insider/outsider issues, and negotiating friendship and objectivity.

本书讲述的华中地区某乡镇基层政权、村级组织和农民在复杂的互动结构中博弈共生的过程和状况，为读者提供了新颖而富启发性的视角，是一部有一定思想冲击力的学术著作。
本书采用“讲故事”的方式叙述，生动展现了农村基层政权以及村、组织和农民个体多方面多层次的工作和生活实态，人物鲜活、情节曲折、可读性强，同时又对描述的对象进行了深入的分析和阐释，是对当下中国农村的不可多得的“深度描写”。

Mark Strand is the author of nine books of poems, including Blizzard of One , winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990, and currently teaches at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

《人生拼图版》描绘了一幢公寓楼里三十来个单元中各家房客的物质生活景观。他们来自不同的阶层，从事不同的职业。有各自形形色色的生活方式和历史经历，构成了社会族类几乎无所不有的标本展览。作品的结构完全不同以往巨型化文学创作中的综合与集成的情节网络化特质，而是像拼图版一样，具有拆零、重组、离散、孤立化倾向，给人以非常独特的艺术感觉，是二十世纪现代生活方式的一种最真实、最活生生的写照。
《人生拼图版》是佩雷克最著名的作品，被称为“辉煌的巨著“、新的“人间喜剧”，并获１９７８年“梅迪西奖”。

This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern.
Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society′. The changing nature of society′s relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.

Three prominent social thinkers discuss how modern society is undercutting its formations of class, stratum, occupations, sex roles, the nuclear family, and more. Reflexive modernization, or the way one kind of modernization undercuts and changes another, has wide ranging implications for contemporary social and cultural theory, as this provocative book demonstrates.

Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a 'back of the mind' issue. We recognise its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Politicians have woken up to the dangers, but at the moment their responses are mainly on the level of gesture rather than being, as they have to be, both concrete and radical. Political action and intervention, on local, national and international levels, is going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming, as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. At the moment, however, Anthony Giddens argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security. This book is likely to become a classic in the field. It will be of appeal to everyone concerned about how we can cope with what amounts to a crisis for our civilisation.

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艾略特被称为“世界诗歌漫长历史中一个新阶段的带领人”，是英语诗歌界“最有影响的诗人之一”。本书全面收录了T·S·艾略特的诗歌。他在诗歌中通过用典暗示、启发读者，含蓄而且深刻地表达对当代西方社会的看法和自己的心路历程。

The most popular of Darwin's books during his lifetime, in a beautifully illustrated new edition
Featuring dozens of color photographs from Darwin's original publication, this edition-issued to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth-makes this classic study newly accessible to modern readers. Published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was a book at the very heart of Darwin's research interests. Darwin's main goal was to demonstrate the power of his theories for explaining the origin of our most cherished human qualities, morality and intellect. The work engages some of the hardest questions in the evolution debate, and it shows the ever-cautious Darwin at his boldest.

While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themeselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists' treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.

This is an exploration of the ambivalent relationship between revolutionary politics and modernist or avant-garde art. Williams clarifies many of the issues that have dogged recent critical discussion: the term “modernism” itself; the distinction between modernism and avant garde; and the possibility of a cultural theory “beyond the modern” which avoids the pitfalls of postmodernism.

This acclaimed book is a master teacher's tested program for turning clumsy prose into clear, powerful, and effective writing. A logical, expert, easy-to-use plan for achieving excellence in expression, "Style" offers neither simplistic rules nor endless lists of dos and don'ts. Rather, Joseph Williams explains how to be concise, how to be focused, how to be organized. Filled with realistic examples of good, bad, and better writing, and step-by-step strategies for crafting a sentence or organizing a paragraph, "Style" does much more than teach mechanics: it helps anyone who must write clearly and persuasively transform even the roughest of drafts into a polished work of clarity, coherence, impact, and personality. A textbook edition with exercises, "Style" is available from Longman.

In contemporary debates, communication is variously invoked as a panacea for the problems of both democracy and love, as a dream of a new information society brought about by new technologies, and as a wistful ideal of human relations. How, and why, did communication come to shoulder the load it carries? In John Durham Peters's work, the teachings of Socrates and Jesus, the theology of Saint Augustine, the political philosophy of Locke, and the American tradition from Emerson through William James all become relevant for understanding communication in our age. Peters finds that thinkers across the centuries have struggled with the same questions - how we can hope for contact with others, what has become of human beings in increasingly technological times, how new modes of communication have altered the ways the world is imagined and how we relate to others - and he weaves intellectual history and communications history together. The book traces the yearning for contact not only through philosophy and literature but also by exploring the cultural reception of communication technologies from the telegraph to the radio. The history of communication, Peters shows, is not a triumphant progress toward global harmony but rather a collection of uncanny devices that conjure angels, spirits and alien intelligences. His is an account of a complex concept that has both shaped us and been shaped by us.