The Walking Dead, Vol. 7: Calm Before continues Robert Kirkman’s long interrogation of what it means to rebuild civilization after collapse. The volume tightens its focus on a single community attempting a return to ordinary life — festivals, social roles, children playing — and shows how fragile that ordinary life is. Kirkman balances moments of … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 7: Calm Before by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 6: This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman
Robert Kirkman’s sixth collected volume of The Walking Dead is where the series’ moral inquiry hardens into spectacle. Collected issues #31–36, This Sorrowful Life stages a collision between two very different social experiments — the fragile, democratic prison community and the performative “safety” of Woodbury under the Governor — and uses that collision to interrogate … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 6: This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Trees, A Celebration edited by Jill Fairchild
Jill Fairchild’s Trees: A Celebration is less a single narrative than a curated chorus of voices, images, and meditations that together compose an arboreal anthology. As its title suggests, the book is not meant merely to instruct or classify, but to honor. What distinguishes this work from more conventional botanical texts is the way it operates at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s book Review – Trees, A Celebration edited by Jill Fairchild
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 5: The Best Defense by Robert Kirkman
Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead has always been a study in the sociology of collapse; Volume 5, The Best Defense, continues that project with an increasingly clear political and moral lens. This collection deepens the series’ central question: when structures fail, what patterns of life and meaning persist, and who gets to decide the rules for a new … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 5: The Best Defense by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 4: The Heart’s Desire by Robert Kirkman
Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead has always presented itself as a paradox: a story ostensibly about the undead that is at heart preoccupied with the living. The Heart’s Desire, the fourth trade in the series, sharpens that paradox into a sustained meditation on the limits and liabilities of desire — not only the erotic or the acquisitive, but … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 4: The Heart’s Desire by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 3: Safety Behind Bars by Robert Kirkman
Volume 3 of The Walking Dead marks a tonal pivot in Kirkman’s ongoing meditation on catastrophe: the terror of the undead remains the engine, but the narrative energy increasingly diverts into the human architectures we build to live with that terror. Where earlier volumes foregrounded immediate survival and the shock of societal collapse, Safety Behind Bars examines the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 3: Safety Behind Bars by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman
If the first volume of The Walking Dead announces Robert Kirkman’s premise—an America emptied of its certainties—Miles Behind Us is where that premise begins to breed complications. The second collected volume refracts the initial trauma of survival into a series of quieter, nastier moral tests: not just how to stay alive, but what kind of people the survivors … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead (Vol.1): Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman
Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye arrives, at first glance, as another entry in the long lineage of zombie fiction; on closer reading it announces itself instead as a careful excavation of what a catastrophe reveals about ordinary human life. Collected from the series’ opening six issues, the volume functions as a primer — not … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead (Vol.1): Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) sits oddly and brilliantly between children’s tale and moral fable, between ethnographic curiosity and wild lyric. Read simply as a collection of animal stories, it is superb entertainment: taut, vivid, and full of suspense. Read as literature, it becomes a compact study in moral pedagogy, imperial imagination, and narrative voice — … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower #4) by Stephen King
Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass performs one of the riskier moves in long-form fiction: it pauses a high-stakes, momentum-driven quest to deliver a sustained, inward-facing romance and tragedy. The result is not a detour but a structural and moral fulcrum for the entire Dark Tower sequence. Where the earlier volumes often read like a hybrid of the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower #4) by Stephen King
The New Renaissance Mindset 