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 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 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 New Renaissance Mindset 