At first glance Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them wears the comfortable disguise of a familiar schoolroom text: a slim compendium of creatures, their habitats, and their hazard ratings, presented as a textbook used within the fictional world of Harry Potter. Read more carefully, however, and Rowling’s faux-field guide becomes a clever literary performance … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Screenplay Review – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows performs the double task required of a concluding volume in an epic sequence: it must both resolve a sprawling plot and transmute the series’ earlier motifs into a final grammar of meaning. In this seventh book, Rowling moves decisively away from episodic schoolroom adventures into a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling’s sixth instalment in the Harry Potter sequence is the book in which the series sheds most of its juvenile skin and begins to operate, with near-full force, as a novel about knowledge, culpability, and the ethical weight of memory. Half-Blood Prince is not merely darker in tone; it is structurally and thematically preoccupied … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
By the fifth book Rowling performs a deliberate tonal swerve: Order of the Phoenix is not merely a continuation of the magical-adventure arc begun in Philosopher’s Stone but the moment when the series grows up, and asks of its readers something harder than puzzles and schoolboy heroics. Structurally the novel is a hinge — bulkier, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire performs a decisive tonal and structural shift in J.K. Rowling’s series: what began as a tightly localized tale of a magical boy on the margins of domestic unease becomes in Book Four an expansive ritual narrative that stages adolescence, institutional failure, and the return of political terror. It … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Rowling’s third instalment in the Harry Potter sequence marks a decisive tonal and structural shift: less the cosy wonder of schoolroom discovery and more a novel preoccupied with memory, justice, and the uncanny ways the past returns to shape the present. Prisoner of Azkaban is both a tighter mystery and a deeper moral exploration than … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
If the first volume of J.K. Rowling’s saga announced a wholly imagined magical world with the innocent exhilaration of discovery, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets registers the series’ movement from charm into consequence. Rowling’s sophomore effort tightens the mechanics of her imagination while deepening the book’s moral and formal ambitions: it is at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
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 New Renaissance Mindset 