James Baquet After over 16 years and more than 2,400 individual columns, this will be my last regular piece of writing for the Shenzhen Daily, so I want to leave you with some work to do. Along with Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and a few others, Mortimer Jerome Adler is one of my great intellectual heroes. But he was a paradox. Born in 1902 and passing in 2001, his life was almost perfectly coeval with the 20th century. Yet his claim to fame was his knowledge of ancient literature, especially that of Aristotle. Though his knowledge was literally encyclopedic — he was for many years chairman of the board of editors of the renowned “Encyclopedia Britannica” — he never took a bachelor’s degree (though he was later granted a doctorate by Columbia University). He was high-minded, nearly abstruse, but his many book titles were meant to bring academic skills to auto mechanics and cafeteria workers: “How to Think About War and Peace,” “Great Ideas From the Great Books,” “Philosopher at Large,” “Aristotle for Everybody,” “How to Think About God,” “Six Great Ideas,” “How to Speak / How to Listen,” “Ten Philosophical Mistakes,” “A Guidebook to Learning,” “Art, the Arts, and the Great Ideas,” and many more. All are worth reading. But nothing he did, not even the great Britannica, has touched as many minds as what most consider his magnum opus: the 52-volume set of “The Great Books of the Western World,” with its innovative two-volume index known as “The Syntopicon.” There is also the 10-volume “Gateway to the Great Books” coordinated with the main set, and six volumes later added of 20th-century material. The original Great Books series starts with the works of Homer and the Greek playwrights, comes up though Plato and Aristotle and so on; addresses such national literatures as those represented by Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe; and comes right up to Dickens and Twain. Along the way the works fall into four large categories: imaginative literature; philosophy and religion; social sciences; and science and mathematics. That should keep you busy reading for a while! Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. having the same age as something 2. clever, modern 3. people who serve food in schools, hospitals, etc. 4. drama, novels, poems, etc. 5. difficult to understand, obscure 6. covering a wide range of topics 7. something self-contradictory 8. major work 9. famous 10. people who repair cars | 