| PRODUCT DETAILS | | My Life in the Middle Ages CD: A Survivor's Tale | | |
My Life in the Middle Ages CD: A Survivor's Tale
What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover -- for better and worse -- who we are. My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that attend the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author's own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he's read and the life that he chose -- and that chose him -- My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic, poignant memoir that's both personal and generational. Whether he is struggling with God (or trying to find out if he believes in one), celebrating the books he's loved and regretting those he'll never read, or leafing through the snapshots in his family album and marveling at the passage of time, James Atlas is always alert to the surprises of everyday life. He parses the fine points of success and failure among New York's "lower upper-middle class" (several of the chapters began as essays in The New Yorker) and expresses the largest themes: "I tried to remind myself that death was a part of life. I was here, then I wouldn't be here." Atlas writes movingly about watching his parents age and his father die. In a wry and soul-searching piece, he recounts his perplexing quest for spiritual meaning after a secular lifetime, a quest that takes him to a private synagogue and a Buddhist meditationcenter. On the tennis court, he ruefully capitulates to his teenage son's blossoming athletic prowess, recalling a similar passing of the torch with his own father forty years earlier. At once pensive and funny, lighthearted and profound, My Life in the Middle Ages is a tale of survival, but also a meditation on how it feels to flourish -- how to live.
Manufacturer: HarperAudio
Price: $5.65
 My Life in the Middle Ages CD: A Survivor's Tale
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| User Reviews |  | It is survivable and funny and worth every bump in the road
rating: 5
What a great story about what is the best time of life. Told with a sense of place in the world...
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needs a kick in the pants
rating: 2
I picked this off the new nonfiction shelf at the library to see what a writer might have to say about the stage of life I'm in too. As others have said Atlas remains, I think, too wrapped up in the expectations of his privileged class--envying classmates who made more money, while living in Manhattan, sending his kids to private schools and maintaining a home in Vermont--methinks he doth kvetch too much.
Just because you have enough skill to make a living as a writer doesn't mean you have anything interesting to say. Honesty alone is not enough if your story is not compelling. Atlas does well with biographies but as autobiography, other than the chapter about his father, this is too self-pitying and more irritating to me at least, simply too mundane.
He has an opportunity for adventure--he mentions going to Tibet for example but derides it as trendy "Jewddhism"--too "commonplace" to consider. Commonplace?! How about staying home and crabbing about your life--that's commonplace. His age doesn't stop him from seeking excitement and engaging the world in new ways, but he'd rather stay on his familiar turf and ponder his limitations. And even a good writer can't make that choice a compelling read. Like reviewer "ts" I was reminded of Woody Allen. Both rarely stray from their Manhattan comfort zone. Which, fair enough as a personal choice, but any work produced as a result is unlikely to tell us much new. We all have these stories, many more interesting than his.
Take some risks James. Learn to scuba dive. Visit the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat. Ride a bicycle around Mexico. Move to New Zealand. Seek some passion. Get outside yourself and your cocoon. Rage a little bit. Then write a book!
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"A salesman has to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."
rating: 5
In one of the central chapters of this work James Atlas writes about the concept of 'life-failure'. He describes the moment of his at the age of fifty being fired, and being forced to consider himself as someone who has not made it in life. He then goes on , somewhat more interestingly, to talk about failures in Literature and comes to what may be the greatest modern literay example of all, Willy Loman, the failure in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." He considers how great literature provides a kind of recognition and understanding of our own situation that moves in the deepest way. At the closing of the first performance of 'Death of a Salesman' the audience did not applaud. It sat stunned. Grown men bent over in their seats , many of them weeping. They recognized in the failure of Willy Loman failures that they had known, perhaps their own, perhaps their fathers'.
Atlas tells in this work of keeping a kind of score-card in which he would follow the professional lives of his classmates, and see who had gotten where in the ' wealth' and 'fame 'derby. A self- confessed child of the lower- middle class( His grandfather was a multi-lingual druggist, and his father a physician in Chicago).It becomes clear to him in his middle -age, the age of closing possibilities and horizons, that he will not get to to the top of the greasy pole. And in this sense be a failure, or perhaps what he regards many to be a 'thwarted life'.
Yet looking from outside at the life and career of Atlas' one could conceivably paint a very different picture. He is a very well-known biographer who has written what to this point is the definitive work on his literary - hero Saul Bellow.He wrote an earlier much praised biography of Delmore Schwartz. He has worked for and written for major literary venues - 'The New York Times Book Review', 'The Atlantic', 'The New Yorker'. He has founded his own publishing line of 'literary biography' supported by Wall Street maven Thomas Lipper. He has thus in the eyes of most achieved a career success well beyond the average.
But if his dream was the dream Harold Bloom says is characteristic of literary inheritors, to somehow overcome the great inspiring predecessor , of course , he has not done that. Bellow, however his life and character whittled down a bit in Atlas' biography is a literary giant of the American twentieth- century. Bellow's kind of success, even in portraying ' failure' as in his depiction of Atlas'most beloved Bellow character , Herzog , is another level of emotional intensity in his work. Bellow in fact with Tommy Wilhem in 'Seize the Day' makes a kind of intense universal cry of pain in 'failure' which certainly has few literary equals anywhere.
Atlas is an insightful , often moving and interesting writer about his own life. He appears to be a decent commendable son, husband, father and human being. He has produced literary work of very high quality. But very very few are true giants, and the bell tolls even for them.
This is a very good book, but it is doubtful that it will provide the answer to his heart's deepest need.
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Wish it was better
rating: 3
Unfortunately, I was disappointed by this book. James Atlas wrote an excellent biography of Delmore Schwartz and is one of the minority of people these days who really cares about literature. Being a fan of his and also middle-aged myself, I started reading this book with high expectations. I was surprised that I was unable to finish the book, which becomes monotonous as the author rants about everything under the sun that bothers him, from the serious (his father's death) to the petty (his teenage son beats him at tennis). You just feel like telling Mr. Atlas to "count your blessings." This book would have benefitted from more humor to help keep things in perspective--after all, Mr. Atlas is a highly talented and privileged individual. The chapter about his father's death is the strongest because it has real weight and is poignantly described. But when he gets to complaining about his son's superior tennis game, I finally (and sadly) put the book down. My son now kicks my butt at tennis, too, but I've learned to be proud of it!
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Like a college bullsession almost 40 years later
rating: 5
Having been a contemporary of Atlas's at Harvard nearly 40 years ago, I was pulled back to that time when we spent hours in the womblike campus setting --priviliged to fantasize about where we were headed. In the blink of an eye, here we are, still trying to make sense of our lives -- but now dealing with all these losses of opportunities, loved ones, energy, dreams and illusions. Atlas hits all the big issues -- death of parents, loss of job, stiffening joints, anxieties about money and marriage and status amongst peers. It's poignant and provocative and, as Atlas has himself done many times, I, too, teared up -- facing up to the reality that there's likely a lot more living behind me than ahead. All in all, a wonderful collection of thoughtful, poignant, sweet, and revealing musings on the beginning of the endgame from a guy who writes about the kind of stuff we'd prefer to ignore, but know we need to reflect on.
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My Life in the Middle Ages CD: A Survivor's Tale
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