New Adventures

Why is my new blog entitled Six Degrees South?  Because it will be chronicling my new life six degrees south of the equator in Jakarta, Indonesia.  Look here for more details.  Will be arriving soon.

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Erik's Book Club: November Selections

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I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all.  Five of them were quite magnificent. The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite.  It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice;  I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out. Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a caution
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Erik's Book Club: September Selections

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I was bogged down in August, but I've roared back in September, reading five books during the month.  Even better is the fact that all five books were fantastic and worth reading. First one I read is a book a dear friend recommended quite some time ago and I found an old copy that I brought with me to Indonesia.  Finally, I read it: Blink, by the prolific Malcolm Gladwell. Though it's one of his older works, it still resonates today. In a nutshell, Gladwell utilizes lessons from psychology and neuroscience to teach us how to make better decisions using our ability to focus extremely quickly on a few essential details. Highly recommended, though it was sad to read the chapter on the Amadou Diallo case.  15 years ago Gladwell provided a blueprint on how police could be better trained so they could avoid cases of accidental police killings of minorities, such as in the Diallo case, by training police to recognize bias and modify their policing. Of course, in the thoroughly unprogr
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Erik's Book Club: August Selections

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