这是一部跨学科的经典之作，在旅行书写研究以及（后）殖民批判领域具有开创性的意义。它深入探究了18世纪中叶以来，旅行书写在欧洲殖民主义扩张进程中的作用，以大量南美洲、非洲的案例，具体阐释了旅行书写如何为欧洲读者生产出一个“欧洲以外的世界”。普拉特细数不同类型的旅行书写，既关注帝国主义事业中占支配地位的宗主国文化，也关注从属的、边缘的接受端文化，并强调两者接触之时产生的互动。本书史料详实，叙事生动，将会带给读者关于帝国主义、殖民主义的新认识。

A rich and splendid book! ---Marghanita Laski. A riveting portrait of French mentalités under the ancien régime. The Great Cat Massacre (1984) is the subject of a scholarly work by American historian Robert Darnton, describing and interpreting an unusual source detailing the murder or "massacre" of cats during the late 1730s by apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris. Darnton describes how, as the apprentices suffered hard conditions, they came to resent the favours which their masters gave to their cats, and contrived to deal with the nuisance cats by slaughtering them so as to distress their masters. Darnton interprets this as an early form of workers' protest. Believing that historians should adopt anthropological methods in order to understand 'the otherness' of previous eras,Robert Darnton analyses a rich variety of sources,from grim peasant folklore to Enlightenment philosophy,in order to show not merely what men and women thought,but why they thought it.