Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All reads like a party thrown by a philosopher with a taste for slapstick and haute cuisine — simultaneously exuberant and argumentative, mischievous and serious. The author is less interested in plotting than in setting ideas loose: the novel delights in collisions — between high and low culture, sacred and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau ivre) by Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre remains one of the electric high points of nineteenth-century poetry: a feverish voyage-vision that reads like an ecstatic manifesto of modern sensibility. Composed when Rimbaud was still a teenager (1871), the poem stages a radical collapse of the speaking subject into an object-world, using the figure of a wayward boat … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau ivre) by Arthur Rimbaud
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell reads like a small, incandescent apocalypse: a compact, fiercely personal document in which a young poet brutalizes his own mythology and attempts — in the same breath — to transfigure failure into art. It is not a comfortable book. It is stubborn, querulous, visionary, and often unbearably intimate: part … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Reviews – The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters is a lucid, humane intervention in a long-running scientific and philosophical conversation about what it means to be “intelligent.” Framed as reporting and cultural history rather than polemic, the book stitches vivid field scenes, archival excavation, and interviews into an argument: plants exhibit a range of sensing, signalling, and adaptive … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Reviews – The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet reads like a distilled apprenticeship in attention. What began as a sequence of private replies (written between 1903–1908) to an earnest novice, Franz Xaver Kappus, has become a canonical pocket-manual for anyone who considers making their inner life the material of art. The book’s power lies not … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire presents itself as a confessional document — a long, elegiac first-person recollection — and through that frame Anne Rice re-animates the Gothic tradition for the late twentieth century. The novel is less a catalogue of monstrous deeds than an extended meditation on consciousness, loss, and moral solitude. Its vampires are not … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy is a curious hybrid: part travelogue, part parable, part self-help tract. It reads like a modern myth packaged as a quest narrative — a protagonist (an everyman narrator) follows a trail of clues to an ancient manuscript in Peru and, in the process, encounters a sequence of “insights” promising a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing by Emily Reason
Emily Reason’s Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing arrives — or feels as if it arrives — at the crossroads between a how-to manual and a cultivated meditation on craft. On the surface it is a pedagogical text: clear sequences of steps, attentive photographs (or visual descriptions), and practical troubleshooting for the awkward moments every novice … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing by Emily Reason
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 occupies an odd but revealing niche at the intersection of self-help pragmatism and organizational psychology. Framed less as a conventional argument-driven monograph and more as a practical toolkit, the book’s modest ambition is its strength: it promises not a wholesale reinvention of the self, but a reorientation — to pay attention … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course
Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course presents itself less as a conventional how-to manual and more as a practiced teacher’s syllabus made beautifully portable. Its ambition—bridging the tactile minutiae of clay work with the larger problems of form, function and aesthetic intention—makes it an especially welcome book for the contemporary ceramicist who wants technique to serve … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course
The New Renaissance Mindset 