With this edition, students can more easily learn how to handle the prose of Cicero�s essays. This opening book of one of his most enduring, influential works, the Tusculan Disputations (written in 45 BC, not far from the end of Cicero's life) develops the idea of the contempt for death. The Acceleration Reader format breaks the original language down into small units or "chunks" of meaning that allow young Latinists a helpful way to �catch the Latin in sequence� and to stay with it rather than with a translation, as they �divide and conquer� the syntactical patterns of Cicero�s prose. This kind of formatting makes something like a phrasebook out of the original; the visual configuration, by highlighting the various fragments whose meanings need to be registered, facilitates the processing that needs to become habitual for reading to become fluent. As students achieve a familiarity with the style, the syntactical patterns, and the essential vocabulary, they can more confidently take up other similar material.
