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
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is less a single book than a long, capacious conversation with the Middle Ages: a compendium of romances, chronicles, saints’ lives and courtly songs that, in a single stroke, made the Arthurian past into England’s founding myth. It is at once encyclopedic and intimate — a work that gathers tradition … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse reads at first like a picture book and ends up feeling like a pocket philosopher’s manual: sparse in language, lavish in feeling, and insistently human. In fifty or so short panels — a handful of words on each page, hand-lettered and paired with loose, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is short, surgical, and—for better or worse—one of the landmark provocations of Western political thought. Written in the wake of his fall from official favour and composed around 1513, the work was not printed until 1532, after Machiavelli’s death; its compactness is part of its power: in a few dozen chapters … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics is a capacious, corrective history: ambitious in chronological sweep, painstaking in archival detail, and insistently revisionist in its aim to relocate mid-century ceramics within the narrative of American modernism. Lynn’s central claim — that between roughly 1940 and 1979 studio ceramics migrated from domestic craft into the arena of … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine
Margaret Lobenstine’s Renaissance Soul speaks directly to a contemporary psychological species: the person who delights in more than one thing and hates the shrink-wrap of a single career identity. Rather than treating multi-interest lives as a problem to be cured, Lobenstine treats them as a design challenge—one that asks readers to reconfigure time, narrative, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Tolkien Compass by Jared Lobdell
Jared Lobdell’s A Tolkien Compass, with the valuable inclusion of J. R. R. Tolkien’s own Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, remains a touchstone for anyone seeking to move beyond fannish admiration to a more disciplined, scholarly engagement with Tolkien’s art. The volume performs a double service: it both collects a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Tolkien Compass by Jared Lobdell
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
Maurine Littleton’s 500 Glass Objects reads less like a conventional catalogue and more like a visual anthology: a sustained argument for glass as a medium that consistently unsettles our categories — between use and display, craft and fine art, commodity and heirloom. The book’s straightforward title promises breadth; what the pages deliver is a series … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fauves and Fauvism by Jean Leymarie
Jean Leymarie’s Fauves and Fauvism reads less like a conventional survey and more like a practiced act of recovery: it brings into focus a moment that, though brief, reoriented the possibilities of painting for the twentieth century. Leymarie approaches the subject with the twin tools of an attentive connoisseur and a synthetic historian—he situates the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fauves and Fauvism by Jean Leymarie
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (a seven-book sequence first published 1950–1956) is at once a cornerstone of modern children’s literature and a knot of theological, mythic and cultural tensions. Read as a sustained experiment in imaginative pedagogy, the books deploy fairy-tale economy—clear moral polarities, archetypal figures, and episodic structure—to teach, to delight, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
The New Renaissance Mindset 