Book Owner by Mortimer J. Adler, from ‘How To Mark a Book,” Saturday Review, 1940
There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best-sellers—unread,
untouched. This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books. The second has a great many
books—a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day
they were bought. This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect
for their physical appearance. The third has a few books or many—every one of them dogeared and
dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled from front to back. This man owns
books.
Types of coral reefs by F.D. Ommanney from The Shoals of Capricorn, 1952
Rpt in Norman A. Brittin, A Writing Apprenticeship, 2
nd
ed., 1968
There are three main types of coral reef. The first is the fringing reef which lies just off the main shore,
separated from it by a narrow and shallow lagoon. It is this kind of reef which encircles Mauritius like a girdle,
leaving between itself and the coast of the island a shallow stretch of water, in places only a few hundreds yards
wide but in others, as at Grand Port, expanding to a width of two miles or more. Fringing reefs, too, encircle
many of the islands that we visited such as Coevity and Angalega and, though irregular and broken in places, lie
off part of the coast of Mahe and Praslin in the Seychelles. Down the east coast of Africa from Cape
Guardafui to the coast of Portuguese East there runs an almost continuous coral reef, which is mostly of the
fringing type.
The second type is the barrier reef, which lies at much greater distance from the coast than the fringing reef
and may be several miles wide with channels through it, and is separated from the mainland by a wide lagoon.
The most famous example of this type is the Great Barrier Reef off the eastern coast of Australia. It is over a
thousand miles long. In its northern half the barrier may not be more than twenty or thirty miles from the
Queensland coast, but in its southern half it is as much, as fifty or one hundred miles from the coast and
consists of several parallel reefs with channels between them.
The third type of reef is the atoll, a ring of growing corals crowned with palm trees, often hundreds of miles
from any true land and rising abruptly in the ocean a depth of thousands of fathoms. In the Chagos Islands,
we found true atolls at Diego Garcia and Peros Banhos, irregular rings of coral rock and sand which lush
vegetation has taken root, and on which plantations have long been cultivated by man. In the Aldabra groups,
seven hundred miles south west of the Seychelles, we found coral reefs of varying degrees of perfection.
Television Detectives Student Model
Detective programs, which are usually fast paced and exciting, are among the most entertaining television
programs. Viewers come to see the detectives as clever, capable, and strong. However, most of these shows
present unrealistic characteristic characters and situations that underestimate the intelligence of viewers. Three
types of detective insult viewers on these shows: private citizens, police officers, and private officers, and
private investigators. The first and most numerous category of unrealistic television detectives is private
citizens. These detectives have no legal authority but somehow always become involved in criminal activities,
often solving crimes that police cannot. “Murder, She Wrote” for example, depicts Jessica Fletcher, an aging
author who lives in a small Maine village and bicycles around the villiage, solving a new every other day. By
expecting viewers to believe such a small village has so much and varied crime, the writers of the show treat
viewers as idiots. Another example of private citizen detective is “The A-Team,” which depicts four former
soldiers who fight gangsters, loan sharks, unjust landlords, and military regimes in order to right the wrongs in
the world. The A-Team fights with machine guns and explosives, but even though the A-Team works in the
middle of the city, police officers never respond to the lively chatter of the machines guns or the dull boom of
the explosives. That the police never respond is incredible.
The second type of television detective that challenges credibility is the police officer such as “Hunter.”
These police officers sometimes at illegally themselves as they solve crimes; otherwise, they are much more
clever than the other police. Hunter’s duty is to uphold the law, but he beats a criminal senseless in every
episode. When he finds the informant or criminal that he is seeking, Hunter beats the criminal until he gives
Hunter the information he wants. For a viewer to believe that the criminal would not report this beating to the
proper authorities is unimaginable, showing the writers have a blatant disregard for the intelligence of the
average viewer. Another example of the police officer television detective is “T.J. Hooker,” who has been a
police officer for twenty-five years and has solved every crime ever committed. Hooker never does paperwork.
He also never adheres to the rules and regulations; in fact, he ignores them.