The Penland Book of Ceramics is less a manual than a curated conversation: a communal atlas of gesture, material, and the apprentice's slow apprenticeship into the logic of clay. Brought together under the auspices of a school whose name has become shorthand for intensive craft pedagogy, this volume reads like a series of masterclasses transcribed … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
Marc Lancet’s Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics reads less like a technical manual and more like a close, sustained meditation on a living craft. The book invites the reader into the humid, smoky hinterlands of Japanese kiln culture — into the pungent vocabulary of ash, flame, and clay — and does so with a critic’s attention to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr arrives, for readers and viewers alike, as more than a catalogue raisonné or a retrospective: it is a focused attempt to translate a restless, pictorial imagination into the language of the book. Glenn Barr’s work—at once cartoonish and baroque, playful and implacably strange—resists tidy taxonomies; this volume, by … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise reads like a visual novella: a tightly edited, obsessively staged universe in which mid-century glamour and urban rot coexist, and where the human figure—often a femme fatale, a weary vixen, or a mechanized other—functions less as subject than as cultural index. The book, co-published by La Luz de Jesus and Last … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools by Mara Krechevsky
Mara Krechevsky’s Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools reads less like a conventional how-to manual and more like a practiced ethnography of classrooms — an ars poetica for teachers who want to see what learning looks like when it is taken seriously as an object of attention. The book’s clear, capacious argument is … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools by Mara Krechevsky
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts by Leonard Koren
Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts reads less like a conventional monograph and more like an invitation to a practiced, patient conversation — half aphorism, half careful exegesis — with one of the thinnest and most capacious concepts in modern aesthetics. Where so many volumes try to define wabi-sabi by checklist or historical excavation, Koren treats … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts by Leonard Koren
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell by Sy Montgomery
Sy Montgomery has long worked at the attentive edge where natural history becomes moral philosophy, and Of Time and Turtles picks up — with a patient, heartbreakingly reverent hand — the threads that connect bodily fragility to planetary repair. The book stages the turtle’s shell as both literal armor and fragile archive: a record of past injuries, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell by Sy Montgomery
The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki & Wayne Grady
David Suzuki & Wayne Grady’s Tree, A Life Story stages a quiet but insistent argument: to know a tree is to know a world. At once elegy, primer, and manifesto, the book reframes arboreal biography as a mode of ethical attention. Suzuki’s scientific gravitas and Grady’s narrative tact combine to make a book that is neither pure … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki & Wayne Grady
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy Stewart
Amy Stewart’s The Tree Collectors – Tales of Arboreal Obsession is a masterful fusion of natural history, biography, and cultural critique, offering a multifaceted portrait of humanity’s enduring fixation with trees. Rather than a linear narrative, Stewart assembles a compendium of “tales”—ranging from Renaissance botanists who risked everything to sketch exotic saplings, to modern-day activists … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy Stewart
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – On Writing: A Memoire of the Craft by Stephen King
Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a remarkable hybrid: part autobiography, part master class, and wholly characteristic of its author’s unpretentious candour. Far more than a mere how‑to manual, it offers an illuminated path through the writer’s life, exposing—like a carefully dissected cadaver—the anatomy of a story. King’s gift for storytelling transforms these … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – On Writing: A Memoire of the Craft by Stephen King
The New Renaissance Mindset 