Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life is at once a popular-science exploration, a piece of natural history, and a sustained act of imaginative reorientation. The book’s central achievement is pedagogical and ethical: it trains the reader to look at fungi not as a shadowy footnote in the story of living things, but as a set of processes … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures by Merlin Sheldrake
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is one of the most durable pieces of twentieth-century Christian apologetics: part sermon, part philosophical essay, part intimate conversation. It began as a series of BBC radio talks delivered during the Second World War, and its compactness—an attempt to state the core of Christian belief plainly and persuasively—remains both its strength … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra) by Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra) is often treated, in popular memory, as a lurid melodrama or simply the source-text for later musicals and films. Read on its own terms, however, the novel reveals itself as a compact study in theatricality: a work that stages questions about authorship, monstrosity, love, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra) by Gaston Leroux
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird endures because it manages a peculiar double feat: it is both an intimate, convincing childhood memoir and a sustained, moral indictment of a community’s blindness. Reading it objectively, one sees how Lee shapes form and voice to make ethical judgment feel inevitable rather than didactic — and how the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
Simon Leach’s Pottery Handbook stands as both a technical manual and a philosophical meditation on craft. Descended from one of Britain’s most celebrated lineages of studio potters—his grandfather Bernard Leach being the seminal figure in the Anglo-Japanese pottery tradition—Simon Leach bridges tradition and contemporaneity with rare grace. His handbook is not merely an instructional text … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Metal Vessels arrives like a compact anthology of the everyday and the ceremonial — a taxonomy of containment that doubles as a meditation on form, function and the material imagination. If a vessel’s primary job is to hold, this book insists that holding is never neutral: it is a cultural act, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Knives is at once a catalogue of craft and a meditation on form. Like other volumes in the “500” series, it trusts the visual authority of objects to make an argument: that knives—tools born of necessity—have been consistently shaped by cultural priorities, technological change, and aesthetic impulse. The book’s pleasures are … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Enamelled Objects: A Celebration of Color on Metal Edited by Marthe Le Van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Enamelled Objects is an exercise in visual generosity: a catalogue raisonné of the enamelled surface presented less as dry typology and more as a sustained love letter to colour, light, and the tiny, deliberate acts of making that turn metal and glass into something incandescent. The book’s premise is simple and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Enamelled Objects: A Celebration of Color on Metal Edited by Marthe Le Van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Creating the Vintage Look: 35 ways to upcycle for a stylish home by Ellie Laylock
Ellie Laylock’s Creating the Vintage Look arrives as a gentle manifesto for the second life of things. Part practical handbook, part elegy for the handcrafted object, the book stages thirty-five projects that read as short essays in material culture: each one a measured argument for keeping, altering, and celebrating the past rather than erasing it. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Creating the Vintage Look: 35 ways to upcycle for a stylish home by Ellie Laylock
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Robyn Griggs Lawrence’s Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House is at once modest and insistent: modest in scale and encomiastic of everyday materials, insistent in its claim that the ethics and aesthetics of wabi-sabi belong not to museums or museums-of-taste but to ordinary domestic practice. The book performs a careful, corrective gesture — it reframes … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
The New Renaissance Mindset 