J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone performs a curious double task: it reanimates familiar strands of the British children’s-book tradition (the orphaned schoolboy, the boarding school adventure, the fairy-tale quest) while announcing, with surprising economy, the existence of a fully imagined parallel moral universe. Read as a discrete text rather than merely the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes by Caroline Rowland
Caroline Rowland’s The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes reads at first like a beautifully curated cabinet of curiosities — a procession of storefronts and private interiors that insist, by virtue of their arrangement and photography, on a particular kind of attention. But read more closely, and Rowland’s book does … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes by Caroline Rowland
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (with a bonus at the end: Cyrano’s “A Nose…” monologue)
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is at once a theatrical confection and a sharply worked tragedy of language. Written for the theatre — and written to be heard — the play glories in the sound of words: the quick thrusts of wit, the rolled cadence of heroic verse, the extravagant pyrotechnics of rhetoric. Yet beneath … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (with a bonus at the end: Cyrano’s “A Nose…” monologue)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross’s The World of Edward Gorey is less a conventional monograph than an act of tasteful conjuration: a careful, lovingly lit cabinet that sets an uncanny miniature theatre at the center of view. Ross treats Gorey not simply as an illustrator who doodled at the margins of Victorian melodrama, but as a singular authorial … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer
Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking is an unlikely classic: at once a pragmatic manual, a conversational memoir, and — when read closely — a vernacular text that helped shape twentieth-century American domestic culture. First self-published in 1931 as a modest compilation of tested recipes and “casual culinary chat,” the book rapidly left the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Roomanitarian by Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins’s Roomanitarian is a compact blast of the author’s characteristic electricity: part essay collection, part personal manifesto, and entirely tuned to the register of a voice that has been honed on stages, bus trips, and the small, unforgiving hours of hotel rooms. First published by Rollins’s own 2.13.61 press in 2005, the book runs … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Roomanitarian by Henry Rollins
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Dull Roar by Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins has long worn many faces — punk provocateur, spoken-word performer, travel diarist, cultural gadfly — and A Dull Roar reads like the distilled audio of those public selves turned inward. The book insists on being heard: its sentences are kinetic, its cadence muscular, and its moral energy rarely sits idle. As a work … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Dull Roar by Henry Rollins
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art is a capacious, elegiac portrait of a place and a moment. It threads biography, cultural history, and close-looking criticism to argue that Montmartre — with its cafés, studios, cheap lodgings and convivial degradations — was not merely backdrop but active engine of a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
Jim Robison’s Slab Techniques is a concise, unpretentious primer that manages the useful trick of being both immediately practical and quietly provocative. Presented as part of the Ceramics Handbooks series, the book lays out slab building not as a single method but as a family of choices — a toolkit of decisions about clay, joinery, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
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 New Renaissance Mindset 