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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse reads at first like a picture book and ends up feeling like a pocket philosopher’s manual: sparse in language, lavish in feeling, and insistently human. In fifty or so short panels — a handful of words on each page, hand-lettered and paired with loose, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is short, surgical, and—for better or worse—one of the landmark provocations of Western political thought. Written in the wake of his fall from official favour and composed around 1513, the work was not printed until 1532, after Machiavelli’s death; its compactness is part of its power: in a few dozen chapters … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics is a capacious, corrective history: ambitious in chronological sweep, painstaking in archival detail, and insistently revisionist in its aim to relocate mid-century ceramics within the narrative of American modernism. Lynn’s central claim — that between roughly 1940 and 1979 studio ceramics migrated from domestic craft into the arena of … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine
Margaret Lobenstine’s Renaissance Soul speaks directly to a contemporary psychological species: the person who delights in more than one thing and hates the shrink-wrap of a single career identity. Rather than treating multi-interest lives as a problem to be cured, Lobenstine treats them as a design challenge—one that asks readers to reconfigure time, narrative, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Tolkien Compass by Jared Lobdell
Jared Lobdell’s A Tolkien Compass, with the valuable inclusion of J. R. R. Tolkien’s own Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, remains a touchstone for anyone seeking to move beyond fannish admiration to a more disciplined, scholarly engagement with Tolkien’s art. The volume performs a double service: it both collects a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Tolkien Compass by Jared Lobdell
The New Renaissance Mindset 