本书为公版书，为不受著作权法限制的作家、艺术家及其它人士发布的作品，供广大读者阅读交流。汇聚授权电子版权。

From V. S. Naipaul: For my travel books I travel on a theme. And the theme of "The Masque of Africa" is African belief. I begin in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economical life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the politi...(展开全部)

Like all of V. S. Naipaul's "travel" books, The Masque of Africa encompasses a much larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization. from V.S.Naipaul: For my travel books I travel on a theme. And the theme of The Mas...(展开全部)

Moving beyond travelogue, The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul's journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as th...(展开全部)

The common fruit fly, Drosophila, has long been one of the most productive of all laboratory animals. From 1910 to 1940, the center of Drosophila culture in America was the school of Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges. They first created “standard” flies through inbreeding and by organizing a network for exchanging stocks of flies that spre...(展开全部)

The Greek word melancholia (literally meaning 'black bile') defines our sense of depression and black moods. Yet the little black dress is the epitome of chic and has positive meanings. From ancient and classical times to today black has been used as a symbol, a tool and a metaphor in a plethora of startling and often problematic ways. The Story of Black is an exploration of ou...(展开全部)

大卫·古德赛尔（David S. Goodsell） 美国加州斯克里普研究中心（The Scripps Research Institute）分子生物学系教授，当代最为著名的科学插画师之一。 他的作品最令人着迷之处是：利用X射线晶体学技术获得准确的分子结构，然后用水彩画将它们完美地展现出来，使人们获得对分子精微世界的具象认识如此感性而又具有科学的准确性。作为一名分子生物学家，古德赛尔在承袭了欧洲数世纪以来科学绘画的伟大传统的同时，利用现代尖端技术获得分子世界的准确数据，将这些新科学、新技术所揭示的自然存在一一展现在科学家和普罗大众面前。他的著作包括《The Machinery of Life》《Our Molecular Nature》《Bionanotechnology: Lesson from Nature》等。

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a...(展开全部)

In "The Logic of Life", Francois Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA.

The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned call to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come "to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has h...(展开全部)