My Life in the Middle Ages : A Survivor's Tale

Atlas, James

ISBN 10: 0060196297 / ISBN 13: 9780060196295

Published by HarperCollins Publishers, 2005

About this Item

Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good.

Seller Inventory # 54428538-75

Bibliographic Details

• Title: My Life in the Middle Ages : A Survivor's Tale
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060196297
• ISBN 13: 9780060196295
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 1.023 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

Striving children, aging parents, job pressures, financial anxieties, physical ailments, generalized hope and dread―a memoir of middle age that is both literary and confessional

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. Of all the challenges that face us in this time of reckoning, the effort to accept the limits of our character, the dwindling of possibilities, and the gap between our aspirations and reality is perhaps the most daunting. 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, in 12 chapters, of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that haunt us on 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 and poignant memoir that’s both personal and generational.

About the Author

James Atlas has been an editor for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times Magazine and a staff writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He is the founder of Atlas Books and the general editor of the Eminent Lives series. His other books include Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, Bellow: A Biography, and a novel, The Great Pretender. He lives with his wife and two children in New York City.