John Densmore’s Riders of the Storm is at once an intimate memoir and a corrective history: part loving excavation of a band’s inner life, part juridical record of what fame does to art and friendship. Written by the Doors’ drummer, the book performs a delicate double move — it insists on the primacy of the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Riders of the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors. by John Densmore
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive is less a dispassionate life-history than a rite of remembrance: a fevered, piecemeal canonization of Jim Morrison that helped turn an already mythic rock singer into a modern Prometheus of American pop-culture. First published in 1980, the book occupies a peculiar position between popular … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The Penland Book of Ceramics reads like a field diary kept at the intersection of craft pedagogy and artistic confession. Edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott and assembled from the teaching tradition of the Penland School of Crafts, this handsome volume (Lark Books, 2003) aims not simply to catalogue techniques but to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Utopia by Thomas More
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) reads like a paradox that learned its art of contradiction. On the surface it is a crisp, economical travel narrative — the voice of Raphael Hythloday recounting an island society — but beneath that surface it is a moral mirror and a rhetorical trap. The author fashions a work that is … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Utopia by Thomas More
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab-Built Ceramics by Coll Minogue
Coll Minogue’s Slab-Built Ceramics presents itself — and persuades — as more than a how-to manual: it is a meditation on process, an argument about the expressive possibilities lodged in a single, humble slab of clay. Read as a craft text, it is pedagogically rigorous; read as an artist’s tract, it is provocatively poetic. Read … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab-Built Ceramics by Coll Minogue
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928) stands as one of the most quietly profound works in children’s literature—a book that, under the gentle veil of whimsy, reflects deeply on friendship, identity, and the fleeting nature of childhood. Though often shelved as a companion to Winnie-the-Pooh, it is, in many ways, the more … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Few works of children’s literature invite as sustained a double-vision as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh: at once an apparently simple collection of episodic adventures for very young readers and a compact, artful meditation on friendship, play, authority, and the strange temporality of childhood. Published in 1926, the book wears its modesty like a costume—genial, unassuming, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
Maureen Mills’s Surface Design for Ceramics reads like a compact manifesto for the small, concentrated art of ornamentation — not a polemic but a pedagogy: a careful, image-rich argument that the surface of a vessel is not mere decoration appended to a form but an active partner in meaning-making. Presented as one of the practical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Mike Mignola’s Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire reads like a found object from a ruined twentieth century: a book that is equal parts trench-mud odyssey, moral fable, and Gothic reliquary. Conceived by Mignola and written with Christopher Golden, it was published as an illustrated novel in 2007 and later expanded into … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s Joe Golem and the Drowning City announces itself as many things at once: an illustrated novel, a pastiche of pulp detective fiction, a piece of dark folklore, and a careful exercise in atmosphere. Published as an illustrated novel in 2012, it is a collaborative hybrid in which Mignola’s visual imagination … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
The New Renaissance Mindset 