Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty reads at first like a fable about taste: a slim, gleaming novel in which the currency is looks, and the marketplace is Manhattan. Scratch the surface, though, and his book reveals itself as a careful, often savage study of perception and performance — of how beauty is produced, packaged, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company marks a deliberate, surprising pivot from the manic public persona of a stand-up comedian into the quiet interior life of a man who treats his small world with the solemnity of a museum curator. The novel is less a plot-machinery-driven narrative than a sustained, tender study of habit, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays by Steve Martin
Steve Martin’s theatrical voice is at once unexpected and inevitable. Best known to many as a stand-up comedian and film star, he here applies his comedian’s ear and a surprising dramaturg’s restraint to a body of work that asks: what happens when genius is treated as a social fact rather than an untouchable aura? Picasso … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays by Steve Martin
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Shopgirl by Steve Martin
Steve Martin’s Shopgirl is a small, deceptively plain-minded novella that quietly outmaneuvers expectations. Written by a performer known for physical comedy and public personae, the book is nevertheless a sober, elegiac study of solitude, commodified intimacy, and the dissonance between private yearning and public performance. Martin’s turn from stand-up to short fiction pays off: he … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Shopgirl by Steve Martin
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up is less a celebrity memoir and more an exercise in the poetics of performance. Written with the same economy and precise timing that made Martin one of the most influential stand-up artists of the late twentieth century, the book maps the career of a man who used absence and restraint … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin’s The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting stakes a clear claim to usefulness: it is a book written by a practitioner for practitioners, and it reads that way—methodical, economy-minded, and exquisitely practical. But what elevates this manual beyond a mere how-to compendium is the way the author balances procedural exactitude with … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* by Mark Manson
Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* reads at first like a bracing corrective to the saccharine optimism of mainstream self-help. It promises, in its blunt title and confessional tone, a kind of ethical austerity: rather than accumulating endless possibilities and forced positivity, the wise person economizes her cares, chooses what matters, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* by Mark Manson
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
Og Mandino’s slim manual masquerading as a parable is one of those improbable cultural artifacts that lives at the crossroad of devotional tract, business primer, and bedside oracle. First read as a how-to for commercial success, it invites a closer, more charitable reading: as a concentrated study in habit, identity, and the rhetoric of self-transformation. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is less a single book than a long, capacious conversation with the Middle Ages: a compendium of romances, chronicles, saints’ lives and courtly songs that, in a single stroke, made the Arthurian past into England’s founding myth. It is at once encyclopedic and intimate — a work that gathers tradition … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory
The New Renaissance Mindset 