At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
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 New Renaissance Mindset 