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 