The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversations Within Our Bodies Impact our Mood, Our Choices, and Our overall Health by Emeran Mayer

Emeran Mayer’s The Mind-Gut Connection reads like an extended, lucid argument built at the crossroads of medicine, neuroscience and narrative. Its central thesis—that the brain and the gut are in ongoing, bidirectional conversation and that this dialogue shapes mood, behaviour, and health—will be familiar to readers of contemporary popular science. What Mayer achieves, however, is … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversations Within Our Bodies Impact our Mood, Our Choices, and Our overall Health by Emeran Mayer

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu

Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty reads at first like a fable about taste: a slim, gleaming novel in which the currency is looks, and the marketplace is Manhattan. Scratch the surface, though, and his book reveals itself as a careful, often savage study of perception and performance — of how beauty is produced, packaged, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company marks a deliberate, surprising pivot from the manic public persona of a stand-up comedian into the quiet interior life of a man who treats his small world with the solemnity of a museum curator. The novel is less a plot-machinery-driven narrative than a sustained, tender study of habit, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s theatrical voice is at once unexpected and inevitable. Best known to many as a stand-up comedian and film star, he here applies his comedian’s ear and a surprising dramaturg’s restraint to a body of work that asks: what happens when genius is treated as a social fact rather than an untouchable aura? Picasso … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays by Steve Martin

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Shopgirl by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s Shopgirl is a small, deceptively plain-minded novella that quietly outmaneuvers expectations. Written by a performer known for physical comedy and public personae, the book is nevertheless a sober, elegiac study of solitude, commodified intimacy, and the dissonance between private yearning and public performance. Martin’s turn from stand-up to short fiction pays off: he … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Shopgirl by Steve Martin

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up is less a celebrity memoir and more an exercise in the poetics of performance. Written with the same economy and precise timing that made Martin one of the most influential stand-up artists of the late twentieth century, the book maps the career of a man who used absence and restraint … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin’s The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting stakes a clear claim to usefulness: it is a book written by a practitioner for practitioners, and it reads that way—methodical, economy-minded, and exquisitely practical. But what elevates this manual beyond a mere how-to compendium is the way the author balances procedural exactitude with … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* by Mark Manson

Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* reads at first like a bracing corrective to the saccharine optimism of mainstream self-help. It promises, in its blunt title and confessional tone, a kind of ethical austerity: rather than accumulating endless possibilities and forced positivity, the wise person economizes her cares, chooses what matters, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* by Mark Manson

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

Og Mandino’s slim manual masquerading as a parable is one of those improbable cultural artifacts that lives at the crossroad of devotional tract, business primer, and bedside oracle. First read as a how-to for commercial success, it invites a closer, more charitable reading: as a concentrated study in habit, identity, and the rhetoric of self-transformation. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino