Carol Stangler’s The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden is, at heart, a book about persuasion: it asks the reader to see bamboo not as a decorative novelty, but as a living medium with history, utility, and aesthetic dignity. The revised and updated 2009 edition presents itself … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden by Carol Stangler
T.A.E.’s Book Review – Make It in Clay – A Beginner’s Guide to Ceramics by Charlotte Speight & John Toki
Make It in Clay: A Beginner’s Guide to Ceramics reads less like a glossy craft manual than like an apprenticeship compressed into a book. First published in 1997 and revised in 2001, it appears as a spiral-bound, 224-page guide by Charlotte F. Speight and John Toki, aimed at a “simple, beginning studio situation.” That phrase … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – Make It in Clay – A Beginner’s Guide to Ceramics by Charlotte Speight & John Toki
T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren is not merely an art collection—it is a philosophical atmosphere rendered in pigment, a meditation on fragility, wonder, and the strange dignity of awkwardness. To approach this book as a conventional monograph would be to miss its essential gesture; the artist is less … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
T.A.E.’s Book Review – Easy Concrete: 43 DIY Projects for Home & Garden by Malena Skote
Malena Skote’s Easy Concrete: 43 DIY Projects for Home & Garden is a surprisingly graceful book for a material so often associated with heaviness. Published in 2010 and circulated in English-language editions under both Lark Books and New Holland, it presents concrete not as brute substance but as a medium for domestic invention. Library and … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – Easy Concrete: 43 DIY Projects for Home & Garden by Malena Skote
T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Japanese Pottery Handbook by Penny Simpson, Lucy Kitto, and Kanji Sedeoka
The Japanese Pottery Handbook is the kind of book that quietly reveals its seriousness by refusing the vanity of seriousness. First published in 1979 and later revised in 2014, it presents itself not as an ornamental art book but as a working manual: compact, bilingual, and deliberately hands-on. That practical identity is not a limitation; … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Japanese Pottery Handbook by Penny Simpson, Lucy Kitto, and Kanji Sedeoka
T.A.E.’s (The Adaptable Educator) Book Review – The Ultimate Basket Book: A Cornucopia of Popular Designs to Make by Lyn Siler
The Ultimate Basket Book: A Cornucopia of Popular Designs to Make (2006) presents itself as an expansive, practical craft volume: it combines The Basket Book and Handmade Baskets, adds ten extra projects, and includes new colour photography. The edition is listed as a 192-page book published by Lark Books in New York, and the available … Continue reading T.A.E.’s (The Adaptable Educator) Book Review – The Ultimate Basket Book: A Cornucopia of Popular Designs to Make by Lyn Siler
T.A.E.’s (The Adaptable Educator) Book Review – Refuse to Choose: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams by Barbara Sher
Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose is less a self-help manual than a quiet rebellion against one of modern life’s most persistent moral fictions: that a meaningful person must become one thing, permanently, and then remain legible to everyone else. Her central argument is generous and radical. She refuses to treat curiosity as a flaw, breadth … Continue reading T.A.E.’s (The Adaptable Educator) Book Review – Refuse to Choose: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams by Barbara Sher
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 New Renaissance Mindset 