A Short History of Nearly Everything万物简史 英文原版 [平装] pdf epub mobi txt 电子书 下载 2025

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☆☆☆☆☆

Bill Bryson（比尔·布莱森） 著

图书标签:

• 科学
• 历史
• 科普
• 非虚构
• 物理
• 化学
• 生物
• 宇宙
• 地球
• 知识

出版社： Broadway Books

ISBN：9780767908184

商品编码：19463061

包装：平装

出版时间：2004-09-14

用纸：胶版纸

页数：544

正文语种：英文

编辑推荐

　　这是一部有关现代科学发展史的既通俗易懂又引人入胜的书，作者用清晰明了、幽默风趣的笔法，将宇宙大爆炸到人类文明发展进程中所发生的繁多妙趣横生的故事一一收入笔下。惊奇和感叹组成了这本书，历历在目的天下万物组成了这本书，益于人们了解大千世界的无穷奥妙，掌握万事万物的发展脉络。本书2003年5月在美国出版后，连续数十周高居《纽约时报》、《泰晤士报》排行榜最前列，在年度科学图书排行榜中，本书更是勇夺桂冠！

内容简介

One of the world’s most beloved writers and bestselling author of One Summer takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

　　这是一部有关现代科学发展史的既通俗易懂又引人入胜的书，作者用清晰明了、幽默风趣的笔法，将宇宙大爆炸到人类文明发展进程中所发生的繁多妙趣横生的故事一一收入笔下。惊奇和感叹组成了本书，历历在目的天下万物组成了本书，益于人们了解大千世界的无穷奥妙，掌握万事万物的发展脉络。
　　书中回溯了科学史上那些伟大与奇妙的时刻，引用了近年来发现的最新科学史料，几乎每一个被作者描述的事件都奇特而且惊人：宇宙起源于一个要用显微镜才能看得见的奇点；全球气候变暖可能会使北美洲和欧洲北部地区变得更加寒冷；1815年印度尼西亚松巴哇岛坦博士拉火山喷发，喷涌而出的熔岩以及相伴而来的海啸夺走了10万人的生命；美国黄石国家公园是“世界上最大的活火山”……而那些沉迷于科学的科学家们也是千奇百怪：达尔文居然为蚯蚓弹起了钢琴；牛顿将一根大针眼缝针插进眼窝，为的只是看看会有什么事情发生；富兰克林不顾生命危险在大雷雨里放风筝；卡文迪许在自己身上做电击强度实验，竟然到了失去知觉的地步……
　　本书在讲述科学的奇迹与成就的同时，还浸润着浓郁的悲天悯人的人文关怀。全书从科学发展史的角度对“我们从哪里来？我们是谁？我们到哪里去？”这一千古命题作了极为精当的阐释，每一个人在阅读此书之后，都会对生命、对人生、对我们所生活的世界产生全新的感悟。一位美国小读者的父亲说，读过《万物简史》之后，他对死亡不再感到恐惧……作者认为，这是一本书所能获得的最高评价。

作者简介

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. For twenty years he lived in England, where he worked for the Times and the Independent, and wrote for most major British and American publications. His books include travel memoirs (Neither Here Nor There; The Lost Continent; Notes from a Small Island) and books on language (The Mother Tongue; Made in America). His account of his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, was a huge New York Times bestseller. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and his four children.

　　比尔·布莱森，享誉世界的旅游文学作家。1951年出生于美国艾奥瓦州，毕业于美国德雷克大学。从1973年起，曾在英国居住20年之久，任职于《泰晤士报》与《独立报》，同时也为《纽约时报》、《国家地理杂志》等刊物撰文。后搬回美国，现与妻子和四个小孩居住于新罕布什尔州的汉诺威市。
　　布莱森擅长用不同的眼光来看待他所游历的世界，在他的书里，英国式的睿智幽默与美国式的搞笑绝妙地融合在了一起。他的尖刻加上他的博学，让他的文字充满了幽默、机敏和智慧，使他自己成为“目前活在世上的最有趣的旅游文学作家”（《泰晤士报》）。
　　代表作有《哈！小不列颠》、《欧洲在发酵》、《一脚踩进小美国》、《别跟山过不去》、《请问这里是美国吗？》等多种，每本均高居美、英、加畅销书排行榜前列。其中《哈！小不列颠》更被英国读者推选为“最能深刻传达出英国灵魂的作品”。
　　作者不但才华横溢，兴趣亦十分广泛，在语言学方面著有《麻烦词汇词典》、《母语》、《美式英语》等书，皆为拥有广大拥趸的幽默之作。

精彩书评

"Stylish [and] stunningly accurate prose. We learn what the material world is like from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy and at all the levels in between . . . brims with strange and amazing facts . . . destined to become a modern classic of science writing."
--The New York Times

"Bryson has made a career writing hilarious travelogues, and in many ways his latest is more of the same, except that this time Bryson hikes through the world of science."
--People

"Bryson is surprisingly precise, brilliantly eccentric and nicely eloquent . . . a gifted storyteller has dared to retell the world's biggest story."
--Seattle Times

"Hefty, highly researched and eminently readable."
--Simon Winchester, The Globe and Mail

"All non-scientists (and probably many specialized scientists, too) can learn a great deal from his lucid and amiable explanations."
--National Post

"Bryson is a terrific stylist. You can't help but enjoy his writing, for its cheer and buoyancy, and for the frequent demonstration of his peculiar, engaging turn of mind."
--Ottawa Citizen

"Wonderfully readable. It is, in the best sense, learned."
--Winnipeg Free Press

前言/序言

1 HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE
NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.
A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.
Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.
I'm assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you'd prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you'll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is--every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation--and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.
In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.
And so, from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements--principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
When this moment happened is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether the moment of creation was 10 billion years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these things are notoriously difficult to measure, as we shall see further on. All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
There is of course a great deal we don't know, and much of what we think we know we haven't known, or thought we've known, for long. Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s, when Georges Lem tre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery.
Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise--a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material," or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.
Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow's paper.
The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first photons--the most ancient light in the universe--though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted. In his book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as like looking down from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundredth floor representing now and street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on about the sixtieth floor, and the most distant things--quasars--were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to within half an inch of the sidewalk.
Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realized at once what the two young men had found. "Well, boys, we've just been scooped," he told his colleagues as he hung up the phone.
Soon afterward the Astrophysical Journal published two articles: one by Penzias and Wilson describing their experience with the hiss, the other by Dicke's team explaining its nature. Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.
Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it?
One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe--that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call "a false vacuum" or "a scalar field" or "vacuum energy"--some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang--forms too alien for us to imagine--and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. "These are very close to religious questions," Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001.
The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang. Not long after, mind you. By doing a lot of math and watching carefully what goes on in particle accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10-43 seconds after the moment of creation, when the universe was still so small that you would have needed a microscope to find it. We mustn't swoon over every extraordinary number that comes before us, but it is perhaps worth l...

《宇宙的奇妙旅程：从大爆炸到人类文明的宏伟叙事》 一部探索时间、空间、生命与我们自身起源的史诗级著作 作者：[虚构作者姓名] 译者：[虚构译者姓名] 出版社：[虚构出版社名称] --- 内容概要： 《宇宙的奇妙旅程》并非仅仅是一部科学史的编年史，它是一次横跨近140亿年时空的深度潜航，旨在回答人类最根本的哲学追问：我们从哪里来？宇宙如何演化至此？生命如何在看似不可能的环境中勃发？以及，我们作为智慧的产物，在浩瀚的宇宙图景中占据何种位置？ 本书以宏大叙事的手法，将物理学、化学、地质学、生物学、古人类学和天文学的知识熔于一炉，构建了一个连贯、引人入胜的知识体系。作者摒弃了晦涩难懂的专业术语，以清晰、富有洞察力的笔触，带领读者体验科学发现的激动人心时刻，理解那些彻底改变人类世界观的关键转折点。 第一部分：无中生有——宇宙的黎明与物质的诞生 本部分深入探讨宇宙的开端——那个被称为“奇点”的瞬间，以及随后发生的暴胀时代。我们追溯了物理学定律的形成过程，解释了为什么宇宙的基本常数恰好允许物质的存在。从夸克到质子、中子，再到宇宙微波背景辐射的形成，作者详细描绘了宇宙“黑暗时期”的图景，以及第一代恒星如何点燃了宇宙的灯火。 重点关注恒星的生命周期及其在元素炼金术中的作用。我们学习到，构成我们身体的碳、氧、铁等重元素，并非宇宙之初就已存在，而是来自超新星爆炸的壮烈谢幕。这部分将物质的起源与宇宙的命运紧密联系起来，揭示了我们与遥远星辰之间血脉相连的深刻事实。 第二部分：地球的塑型——行星的形成与生命的萌芽 当我们把目光聚焦到银河系的一个不起眼的旋臂上时，本书进入了太阳系的形成阶段。作者细致地重建了原始太阳星云的演化过程，解释了行星如何通过吸积作用凝聚成型。随后，叙事转向地球——这颗独特的蓝色行星。 地质学成为主线，描述了地球内部的构造活动、板块漂移的漫长舞蹈，以及磁场如何为生命的诞生创造了必要的保护层。本书对“原始汤”理论进行了深入探讨，分析了地球早期海洋环境中，无机物如何通过化学反应，偶然却必然地形成了第一个能够自我复制的分子。化学的魔力在这里达到了顶峰，我们见证了生命（生命体）的第一个微小、脆弱的细胞前体的出现。 第三部分：进化的狂想曲——从单细胞到物种大爆炸 生命出现之后，其演化之路充满了偶然与必然的交织。本部分聚焦于生物学革命性的里程碑。从原核生物到真核生物的飞跃，从有性生殖的出现到寒武纪“生命大爆炸”的奇观，作者系统地梳理了生命形式的复杂性是如何逐步增加的。 尤其引人注目的是对关键进化事件的生动再现：植物登陆如何重塑大气成分，昆虫的翅膀如何开启了天空的征服，以及脊椎动物如何从水中走向陆地。书中详细剖析了诸如大规模灭绝事件（如二叠纪-三叠纪的“大死亡”和白垩纪-古近纪的撞击事件）对生命多样性格局的深远影响，并强调了“漂变”与“选择”在塑造今日生物圈中的共同作用。 第四部分：心智的觉醒——人类的崛起与文明的火花 在生命演化的最后阶段，故事的主角聚焦于灵长类动物中一个相对年轻的分支——智人。本书追溯了从南方古猿到现代人类的漫长迁徙之路，详细考察了直立行走、工具制造、大脑容量的急剧增长如何赋予我们的祖先独特的生存优势。 作者深入探讨了语言和符号思维的起源，这些非物质的工具如何使得知识的积累和文化的传递成为可能。从火的使用到农业的革命，从定居到文字的诞生，本书描绘了人类文明的基石是如何一块块奠定的。同时，它也审慎地探讨了人类心智的独特之处——我们探索宇宙、理解自身局限性的能力，以及这种能力带来的责任。 第五部分：我们所知的边界——未来的挑战与存在的意义 在收尾部分，本书将视角投向现代科学的前沿，并反思人类在宇宙中的位置。通过对量子力学、相对论以及复杂系统理论的通俗阐述，作者引导读者思考我们目前对现实理解的局限性。 我们讨论了气候变化的科学基础、基因编辑技术的伦理困境，以及人类对外星生命的持续探索。最终，本书回归到最初的哲学命题：在一个充满无限可能性的宇宙中，我们短暂的、脆弱的生命体验究竟意味着什么？《宇宙的奇妙旅程》以一种既谦逊又充满敬畏的姿态，鼓励读者拥抱未知，并珍视我们所拥有的这个知识与生命共存的奇迹时刻。 本书特色： 跨学科的整合叙事： 将看似独立的科学领域无缝连接，展现科学知识的整体性。 注重过程而非结论： 深入描绘科学发现背后的思想挣扎、实验的曲折和理论的推翻与重建。 宏大的时间尺度： 通过生动的比喻，将数十亿年的演化压缩成易于理解的篇章。 哲学思辨的深度： 在描述“是什么”的同时，不忘探讨“为什么”和“意味着什么”。 适合读者： 所有对自然世界充满好奇心、渴望建立一套完整世界观的求知者。无论您是科学领域的专业人士，还是希望通过一本引人入胜的读物全面了解科学历史与基础的普通读者，本书都将是一次不可多得的精神盛宴。它不仅是知识的普及，更是一次对人类智慧和存在本身的赞颂。

评分☆☆☆☆☆

这本书的封面设计简直是视觉的盛宴，那种沉静中蕴含着无限能量的感觉，让人一拿在手就舍不得放下。油墨的触感和纸张的细微纹理，都透露出一种对知识的敬畏与珍视。我尤其欣赏那种字体排版的巧思，它既保持了学术的严谨性，又不失阅读的舒适度，即便是长时间沉浸其中，眼睛也不会感到疲惫。装帧的工艺也极其考究，书脊的折叠处处理得恰到好处，体现了出版商对“经典”二字的理解和坚持。每一次翻阅，都像是在进行一次精心策划的仪式，从指尖触及纸张的那一刻起，就预示着一场深邃的精神之旅即将开启。这种对实体书形态的极致追求，在如今这个数字化的时代里，显得尤为珍贵和难能可贵，它不仅仅是一本书，更像是一件值得收藏的艺术品，静静地待在书架上，本身就是一种无声的宣言。

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这本书的知识密度极高，但绝非那种令人望而生畏的堆砌，而更像是一种精心调配的“知识鸡尾酒”。每一种元素——从物理学、化学到生物学和地质学——都被巧妙地融合在一起，形成了一种流畅、和谐的整体风味。初读时，我仿佛置身于一个巨大的知识迷宫，每走一步都有新的发现，偶尔会被一些深奥的概念绊倒。但随着阅读的深入，我开始看到那些隐藏在不同学科背后的统一逻辑和相互关联，那些曾经孤立的知识点如同被磁力吸引，紧密地聚合起来，构成了一幅宏伟的“万物图景”。这种融会贯通的体验，远超出了单纯获取信息的范畴，它重塑了我理解世界运作的基本框架，是真正意义上的“开智”之作。

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阅读这本书的过程，与其说是在学习科学知识，不如说是在参与一场跨越时空的哲学思辨。它迫使我不断地后退一步，重新审视我们习以为常的世界观和时间观。那些关于生命起源、地球的漫长演化、以及人类在浩瀚宇宙中位置的探讨，都如同高悬的警钟，时刻提醒着我们存在的偶然性和奇迹性。我时常会在读到某个惊人的数据或某个科学理论的突破时，停下来，望向窗外，感受那种脚下坚实土地的巨大历史背景。这种“去中心化”的视角，极大地拓宽了我对“现实”的定义，让我对人类文明的成就和局限性有了更深一层的理解，不再将当下的状态视为理所当然的终点。

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最让我感到惊喜的是作者对科学史人物的描摹，那些名字不再是教科书上冰冷的符号，而是被赋予了血肉和复杂的人性。他们是如何在偏见中坚持、如何在贫困中挣扎、又是如何因为一个灵光乍现的念头而改变了人类对世界的认知，这些细节的捕捉，让整个科学发展史鲜活了起来。我仿佛能看到那些科学家们在昏暗的灯光下与数据搏斗，在不被理解的压力下坚持信念的场景。这种对“人”的聚焦，使得那些抽象的科学概念变得可亲近、可共情，它们不再是高高在上的真理，而是由一群有血有肉、充满激情与缺陷的人们一步步摸索出来的成果，极大地激发了我对科学探索精神的向往。

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这本书的叙事节奏把握得如同顶尖交响乐的指挥棒，时而如磅礴的大提琴合奏，将宇宙洪荒的宏大叙事缓缓铺陈开来；时而又化为灵动的长笛独奏，巧妙地切入那些鲜为人知的小科学家的轶事，充满了人性的光辉与挣扎。我发现自己完全被这种抑扬顿挫的节奏牵引着，在不同的尺度间自如穿梭，从夸克层面的微观世界到星系团的尺度，转换之间毫无滞涩之感。作者的笔触轻盈而精准，他懂得如何悬置一个引人入胜的问题，然后层层剥开迷雾，让读者在恍然大悟中感受到知识的魅力。这种叙事上的张力，使得即便是面对那些理论物理或地质年代学等可能枯燥的题材时，也让人保持着高度的好奇心，生怕错过任何一个精彩的转折点。

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好评

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还行吧，没觉得有什么不好

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是本必读好书，包装精细无破损，快递员服务好五分好评

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书的质量不错，京东做活动的时候买书还是挺值的

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质量很好，物流速度也很快

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可以，可以可以

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按时收到，只不过表皮有点脏脏的

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还可以。。。。。

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非常好的一本书，京东的品质和速度一直都很放心，遇到活动价格也很美丽，非常好，买书基本都在这里