The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan
online access from Springer English/International eBooks
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Foreign Affairs The Best of Books 2021

This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing to very favourable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world’s trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalisation. The result? Ageing can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labour, so that inequality falls. Covering many social and political factors, as well as those that are more purely macroeconomic, the authors address topics including ageing, dementia, inequality, populism, retirement and debt finance, among others.

This book will be of interest and understandable to anyone with an interest on where the world’s economy may be going.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

見微知著 : 心靈故事選萃

李怡
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李怡三本暢銷書《細味人生100篇》、《閱讀人生100篇》、《感悟人生100篇》之文章選集，重新編排。

我從二十歲開始，就過着閱讀、編輯、寫作的生涯。數十年來，讀過的書不少（當然想讀而沒有讀的就更多），人生經歷過許多起伏跌宕，在社會上看到最多的並非「失敗乃成功之母」，而"是「成功乃失敗之母」。許多人從高處落下，不是不夠聰明，而是沒有自知之明。

我慢慢發現一些生活的小故事，一些漫不經心的話語，實際上蘊含着生活的大智慧。講出來似乎卑之無甚高論，但若成為時刻警惕自己的座右銘，則對一個人的一生可以有很大影響，甚至帶來關鍵性的轉變。十多年來，我將收集到的小故事，加上自己的解釋和領悟，寫成好幾本關於人生的書。這些書在銷售一時之後，這幾年已沒有重印。現在從這些書中選出我認為最有意思的一百多篇，以新的書名重新出版。

成語「見微知著」的意思，是見到些微跡象，就可以從中知道整個真象和發展趨勢。用作書名，是表示從一些小故事中可以領悟到的大道理和生活智慧。──李怡

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Jimmy Soni (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)
online access from EBSCOhost Ebook
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National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice *Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022”

“A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared.

Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.

Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.

In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success.

Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

藏在地名裏的香港

木木
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優美散文：作者精選數十處香港地名，從中撰文探究香港歷史文化，講述在港生活諸多趣事。
手繪地圖：每篇文章文首配有手繪水彩地圖，標註著名景點與人文古跡，文藝清新，直觀介紹香港各地風貌。
古體詩詞：作者對古體詩詞頗有研究，文中插入許多作者

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)

French Braid: A novel

Anne Tyler
online access from ProQuest Ebook Central
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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

圖解嶺南建築

崔俊, 倪韻捷
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本書挑選了嶺南建築中的民居、園林、學宮、古塔、宗祠等類型, 並以西關大屋、騎樓、圍龍屋、清暉園、揭陽學宮、廣濟橋等經典建築為例，用圖解的形式向讀者呈現出嶺南建築清新明快、中西合璧、務實求變等鮮明的特點,從建築物中了解嶺南建築文化的價值和歷史地位。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

Serhii Plokhy
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"An exemplary account of Europe's least-known large country" (Wall Street Journal) by an award-winning historian.

Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order to understand its present and future.

Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine was shaped by the empires that used it as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Roman and Ottoman empires to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. For centuries, Ukraine has been a meeting place of various cultures. The mixing of sedentary and nomadic peoples and Christianity and Islam on the steppe borderland produced the class of ferocious warriors known as the Cossacks, for example, while the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox churches created a religious tradition that bridges Western and Eastern Christianity. Ukraine has also been a home to millions of Jews, serving as the birthplace of Hassidism—and as one of the killing fields of the Holocaust.

Plokhy examines the history of Ukraine's search for its identity through the lives of the major figures in Ukrainian history: Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kyiv, whose daughter Anna became queen of France; the Cossack ruler Ivan Mazepa, who was immortalized in the poems of Byron and Pushkin; Nikita Khrushchev and his protege-turned-nemesis Leonid Brezhnev, who called Ukraine their home; and the heroes of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, who embody the current struggle over Ukraine's future.

As Plokhy explains, today's crisis is a tragic case of history repeating itself, as Ukraine once again finds itself in the center of the battle of global proportions. An authoritative history of this vital country, The Gates of Europe provides a unique insight into the origins of the most dangerous international crisis since the end of the Cold War.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

動漫摘星錄

黃夏柏
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零距離接觸
當代日本、中國、歐美動漫畫大師

盧子英作為香港資深動畫人，自七十年代起多次出訪日本，親炙多位當代日本動漫畫大師，包括手塚治蟲、宮崎駿、藤子不二雄、永安巧、永井豪……等，好些更結成好友，長期以書信來往。其後他亦有很多機會接觸中國和歐美的動漫界頂尖人物，如中國動漫之父萬籟鳴、中國水墨動畫片之父特偉，以及美國Pixar《Toy Story》的導演John Lasseter等。

本書將從他第一身角度，述說這班影響近代動漫界深遠的大師們的為人處事、工作態度、創作歷程等，每篇輔以大師生平簡介及作品點評；另外，本書收錄了盧氏多年來珍藏的大量相關動漫產品，當中更有各位大師們的親筆簽名畫，彌足珍貴。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)

Bryman's Social Research Methods

Tom Clark, Liam Foster, Luke Sloan, and Alan Bryman
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Clear, comprehensive, and trusted, Bryman's Social Research Methods has guided over a quarter of a million students through their research methods course and student research project. The thoroughly updated sixth edition offers unrivalled coverage of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods with renewed focus and a fresh, modern feel.

New to this edition

Thoroughly but sensitively updated by three new authors. Dr Tom Clark, Dr Liam Foster, and Dr Luke Sloan bring specialist expertise and have worked closely with students and lecturers to build on Alan Bryman's impressive legacy.

Extensively streamlined to provide even more focused coverage of the key aspects of social research, with adjustments made throughout to improve clarity and aid navigation.

A more straightforward writing style makes the content easier for all students to follow ...

A clean, attractive new design makes the material easier than ever to read and use.

Coverage - including citations and real research examples - has been broadened to better reflect the concerns and contexts of the book's geographically diverse, multi-disciplinary readership ...

New material on recent developments within social research, including social media research and big data, has been embedded throughout and the numerous examples of real research have been thoroughly updated.

In new 'Learn from experience' boxes, recent social science graduates from across the UK and Europe share their experiences of conducting a student research project. These candid accounts will inspire readers and help them to avoid common pitfalls and emulate successful approaches.

Expanded digital resources now include a 'research process in practice' simulation, answers to the end-of-chapter questions, videos from the new 'Learn from experience' graduate panel, and screencast tutorials covering the data analysis software packages SPSS, Nvivo, R, and Stata.

(Excerpt from global.oup.com)

香港粤語 : 二百年滄桑探索

張洪年
online access from iRead eBook
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粵語在香港作為一種有機體，有自己蓬勃的生命力，而且不斷地在變化。語言並不如想像之中那樣古板或死板。

1990年代，徘徊在柏克萊東亞圖書館的張洪年教授，無意中看到書架上有一本關於粵語的老書，一時好奇心動，順手抽下；站在昏黃的吊燈底下略略翻閱，接著就坐在圖書館地上，看了整個下午。這一回無心插柳，開拓了他後來二三十年的研究新路向。

《香港粵語：二百年滄桑探索》選輯了張洪年教授歷年所寫的一系列語言學文章，具體描述早期粵語的各種語言現象，解釋香港粵語從十九世紀到二十一世紀之間發生的種種變化。香港早期的粵語來自廣州，二十世紀中期以後逐步與廣州話分道揚鑣，漸漸自成一種語言。如今香港人口絕大部分以粵語為母語，社會上的活動都以粵語為主要溝通語言。香港的粵語雜用大量外來語，有的已經成了本地詞彙一部分，在語音和語法層面也發生了許多新變化。

然而，這些變化到底如何發生，幾時發生？變化的牽涉面有多廣，軌跡是否可循？我們能否在其他語言中，找尋到類似的發展？這種種問題，都是對語言發展歷史有興趣的人必須面對、尋求答案的重要切入點。作者希望能從眾多的語料之中，擬構出粵語在這新舊交替之際的發展軌跡，供後來者參考和討論。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)