Don't Let Time Go to Waste: Lei Yi's Historical Reading Notes

This book is a collection of reading notes written over more than twenty years by renowned historian Lei Yi. It is divided by subject into five parts: Part One, "Worrying for the World and Exploring Its Changes"; Part Two, "Through the Cracks in History"; Part Three, "Never Letting the Years Slip Away"; Part Four, "The Rings of the Mind"; and Part Five, "Reflecting Deeply on World History." In Lei Yi's view, the reading history of an era is the story of a generation's intellectual development and growth. It is a shared recollection of an era's reading and individual experience, and can reconstruct a person's map of knowledge, heart, and thought. Lei Yi's reading notes dwell less on major historical events and focus more on capturing the everyday lives of ordinary people against the backdrop of great historical eras, with all the rich details of what they ate and wore, where they lived and how they traveled, and their joys and sorrows, reunions and partings.