Phaidon's The 20th Century Art Book presents itself as an atlas of modernity: a compact compendium that tries, with admirable audacity, to put the century’s dizzying artistic revolutions into the reader’s hands. It is not a monograph, nor an exhaustive history; it is a curator’s pocket guide, a series of literary vignettes paired with image-plates, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The 20th Century Art Book from Phaidon Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Art Book from Phaidon Press
Phaidon’s The Art Book is not a book that seeks to be read from first page to last as a single sustained argument; it is an atlas of encounters. Its achievement is simple and ambitious at once: to compress the dizzying plurality of visual practice into a portable, democratic form. The editors do not attempt … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Art Book from Phaidon Press
The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
Jane Perryman’s Naked Clay arrives as both manifesto and love letter: a careful, persuasive case for the expressive potency of unglazed ceramics and a sustained meditation on what a surface — left deliberately “bare” — reveals about process, place, and person. The book is at once practical and philosophical, moving between shop-floor particulars (clay bodies, … Continue reading The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (first published 1952) is less a tightly argued treatise than a rhetorically polished manual of moral encouragement. Its long-lived popularity — it has been read, recommended, parodied and debated for decades — rests on a simple, emotionally resonant premise: the orientation of mind shapes the course of … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wealthing Like Rabbits by Robert R. Brown
Robert R. Brown’s Wealthing Like Rabbits announces itself like a contrarian primer: modest in size, mischievous in tone, defiantly uninterested in the pieties of finance-speak. Its subtitle — “An Original and Occasionally Hilarious Introduction to the World of Personal Finance” — is not mere marketing flourish but programmatic: Brown wants to teach, to amuse, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wealthing Like Rabbits by Robert R. Brown
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh is a short, aphoristic meditation on moral agency and the formative power of thought. First published in 1903 as a slim, pamphlet-like tract, it has since persisted as a staple of self-help and New Thought traditions. Read today through a literary-critical lens, the text is at once a rhetorical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Metamorphoses by Ovid
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is less a single tale than an architecture of change: a vast, ebullient mosaic of transformations that proceeds from the universe’s primeval chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar. Composed in fluent dactylic hexameter and stretching across fifteen books, the poem is both encyclopaedia and incantation — an artful catalogue in which the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
"Taboo: The Art of Tiki" is at once a curatorial flourish and a cultural document: a small, handsome volume that archives a particular late-20th-century fascination with Pacific iconography as refracted through the sensibilities of Lowbrow and pop-surrealist artists. Edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten, and credited with contributions from figures … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
Masters: Earthenware arrives not as a dry handbook but as a museum catalogue written in the idiom of the studio. Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra, the volume assembles compact, richly illustrated mini-retrospectives that together argue for earthenware as a lively, experimental, and emotionally capacious medium rather than a mere step on … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees (original French L’homme qui plantait des arbres) is a tiny masterpiece of moral imagination: an elegant parable that compresses a century’s worth of catastrophe and repair into a single, quietly luminous tale. First published in 1953, the story trades the grandiloquence of polemic for the modesty of witness, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
The New Renaissance Mindset 