Americans discard “perfectly good stuff,” which is how Roosevelt Montas came, in high school, to rescue Socrates from a “garbage pile.” The Harvard Classics series, two volumes of which Montas scored one fateful garbage day, was conceived early in the 20th century to fill the “intellectual needs of the average man.” Montas isn’t average. He came from the Dominican Republic to New York City just shy of the age of 12 “with a head full of lice and a belly full of intestinal parasites,” and he grew up to lead Columbia University’s Center for the Core Curriculum. Despite his sto...