A Crown Forged in Language: Henry V and the Performance of Kingship Henry V occupies a fascinating hinge-point in Shakespeare’s history cycle: it completes the arc begun with Prince Hal’s riotous youth and stages his transformation into a king whose authority is built as much on rhetoric as on force. The play is often celebrated … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Henry V by William Shakespeare
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is one of those rare picture books that functions simultaneously as a fable, a miniature psychological drama, and a radical experiment in economy — of line, of colour, and of words. On the surface it tells the simple story of a child’s temper and imaginative flight; beneath that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Brian Selznick's hybrid "novel in words and pictures" re-conceives narrative pacing by treating images as scene — and sometimes sequence — rather than mere illustration. The reader moves through long stretches in which single sentences act like inter-titles while spreads of meticulously rendered, black-and-white images perform the work of action, pause, and revelation. This formal … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
Ivanhoe is Walter Scott’s most famous excursion into English medievalism: part pageant, part moral romance, and part antiquarian essay. Its theatrical scenes (tilt-yards, sieges, trials by combat) sit beside pointed reflections on identity, religious prejudice, and the uneasy reconciliation of Saxon and Norman England. The book is at once intoxicatingly vivid and uneven — grand … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Setting Up Your Ceramic Studio: Ideas & Plans from Working Artists by Virginia Scotchie
Virginia Scotchie’s compact, image-rich manual reads less like a how-to pamphlet and more like a set of curated studio portraits: clear-eyed, practical, and quietly persuasive about the idea that a maker’s workspace is an extension of their thinking. She, herself a practicing ceramist, organizes the book around photographic tours, measured floor plans, and concise commentaries … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Setting Up Your Ceramic Studio: Ideas & Plans from Working Artists by Virginia Scotchie
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
Susan Schwake’s approach in this compact manual is quietly ambitious: deliver fine-art experiences in short, repeatable labs so that a parent, teacher, or small-group leader can run a semester’s worth of explorations with minimal prep and maximum creative payoff. The book is organized as six units (Drawing; Painting; Printmaking; Paper; Mixed Media; plus usage/how-to material) … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The lavish monograph published by Last Gasp and issued as the catalogue to a mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art is more than a handsome picture book: it stages a sustained argument about how “low” imagery—cartoons, B-movies, advertising—can be retooled into a repository for moral satire, visual allegory, and painterly virtuosity. The … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
In Dreamland by Todd Schorr, the picture-book monograph performs a small, wicked miracle: it translates the tactile spectacle of Schorr’s paintings into a narrative argument about American visual fantasy — one in which commercial icons, childhood cartoons, and Old-Master technique collide and breed. The book is both a career statement and a provocation: sumptuous, obscene, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger’s paired novellas arrive—delicately, maddeningly—at a place where private grief and public performance meet. In this compact book the apparently casual voice of a younger sibling steadies two very different attempts to account for Seymour Glass: one an anecdotal, gallant rescue of reputation and social scene, the other a long, digressive attempt at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger’s novel is, in the simplest terms, a virtuoso performance of voice. What makes the book persistently alive — and perpetually debated — is not a complex plot so much as the sustained intimacy and friction of a single consciousness: a teenager whose vernacular, contradictions, and hurts carve out an unmistakable aesthetic. Reading … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The New Renaissance Mindset 