"Anyone who desires to learn need only pick up the book and read, it is that simple", stated Mortimer J. Adler (...). This can be appliable though, in people who know how to read. Frederick Douglass, a black slave, desired to be educated and literate but he had to face many obstacles to achieve this. His essay "Learning to Read and Write" describes his attempts of getting literate and how he finally achieved his goal. Douglass' essay should not be included in Adler's list of Great Books, but instead it should be considered a good book, because it fullfils only one of the three criteria that Adler sets, this of "contemporary significance" (...) and does not fulfill the rest two, the one of "rereadability" and this of "relevance to a very large number of great ideas"(...).

Adler's list of Great Books consists of 443 "world's "classics""(reader), which all of them...