Customer Reviews

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

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Age isn't any barrier to finding enjoyment and information in listening to "My Life In The Middle Ages" as read by the author. Former editor for the New York Times Book Review, Atlas has an impressive resume', which includes founding Atlas Books and writing for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

If you're still enjoying your salad days, Atlas will share a few secrets with you that the years may bring. Those in mid life will find much with which to identify in the experiences the author has remembered in his own life and in the lives of others.

Give a listen as Atlas evaluates himself at this point in time. He is honest about his accomplishments and sometimes poignantly candid about his disappointments - what he has not done and what he now knows he will never do. Has he done as he might have wished as a young man, as a husband, a father?

The death of Atlas's father had an enormous impact upon him, perhaps a glimpse of what the future held. Whatever the case, "My Life In The Middle Ages" is a compilation of what some have gleaned from their life journeys - well worth hearing.

- Gail Cooke

I enjoyed this book. It is well-written, literate in its allusions, sometimes amusing and always modest. Yet it disappoints because ultimately it is no more nourishing or exciting than "comfort food" for those of us who are mired in middle age and welcome any reassurance that on issues of money, sex, health, and personal loss we are little different from others in our feelings of insecurity and diminished expectations. There is little drama or development in this book. It also would have been improved had the author been willing to delve deeper, to be less coy and a little more concrete. Thus, by way of small example, Atlas might have informed the reader that he went to college at Harvard and not forced the reader to deduce it from his many references to Cambridge and the 25th Reunion Report. This might have begun to explain some of his initial delusions of grandeur and his subsequent disappointments.

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!

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.

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.

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!

I found this book at a University Womens book sale last year, stuck it on the shelf and forgot about it. Picked from my bookcase at random recently, I found it richly rewarding in its essays about parents, the "sandwich" generation, getting older, marriage and death, among other things. As a booklover I especially enjoyed the chapter, "Books," where Atlas confesses to an addiction to books, many of which he admires but never reads or finishes. He also admits he no longer feels guilty about all the Great Books and classics that he's never read, and what's more, simply doesn't care. I marked a few books he referenced, and looked them up, one being Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading. But after looking that one up, it didn't sound like a book I could easily relate to, with its emphasis on fantasy and scifi stuff. But who knows? Maybe I'll try it one day. He also admits having forgotten much of what he read feverishly in his college days, although random lines and quotations will float across his consciousness at times.

Perhaps the chapter that intrigued me most here was the one on "money." I think of Atlas as a reasonably successful writer, who has published several books and worked for The NY Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. He runs his own publishing house (Atlas and Company), owns an apartment in NYC and a country home in Vermont, and yet he characterizes himself as (and I had to stop, think and chuckle at this) "lower upper middle class." He also dreads paying his bills, particularly all those credit card purchases of stuff he'd even forgotten he'd bought, and seemed resigned to living in debt. So what's with this guy? Can't he manage his money? Or is there simply never enough, no matter how much you make? But then I thought again, of how I'd never heard of James Atlas before reading this book, so maybe he's not so rich after all. I mean even I can publish a book - and have - but I certainly haven't made any money at it, so ...

But I LIKE this guy. A biographer of modest successes, he claims to have failed as a fiction writer, but when I researched the one novel listed among his books, The Great Pretender, it sounded pretty damned interesting. In fact, I think I'll try to read it. This was, all in all, a very thoughtful and extremely well-written book about, well about, to use an overworked cliche, 'the human condition.' Once again, this James Atlas guy is yet another writer I'd love to sit and have coffee with while we talked about books. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER

Since Mr. Atlas wrote this timeless piece, the stock market has crashed, our 401Ks have shrunk and some of us no longer have our 5 figure monthly salarys.

When I picked the book up at my local library - I was not sure if I would read it - but I have devoured it and will recommend to my book club... many of whom have either lost jobs, lost partners, parents, siblings, or even children, and of the least, have lost our retirement pensions and will be working for the next 10-15 years even though we are coming 'round to 60.

Mr. Atlas has written what all of us have felt and he does it superbly. The inclusion of various pieces of fiction, plays and such that he references, inspires us to go back to our own bookshelves and re-read. One does not have to be uber-rich to relate to the petty day to day - nor today - relate to Bernie Madoff victims.

This book is a must read for anyone who goes to bed at night and spends several hours tossing and turning and wondering "what if"... "what if"... "what if" or maybe just asking "why"???

It grabs you in the gut.

He gave it all he had, but there just wasn't much of interest there. He's a self-described, turmoiled loser, and not very interesting one to boot. Kafka, Roth, and Jeremy Leven (Satan, et al), write about similar troubled Jews, and are much funnier and interesting. I like his honesty, but, it's not worth the price of admission.

Sharp,and witty while at the same time casting a warm and gentle gaze at the daily trials and tribulations of our baby-boomer generation, James Atlas captures the essence of what it means to reach that defining decade. His chapters speak to those of us whose parents are aging and whose children have left the nest; those of us who think of ourselves as successful until we face the reality of the New York real estate market as we attempt to downsize and divest ourselves of the "suburban" mini-estates where we raised our children. I laughed out loud,while calling out to my husband "He's talking about us."