I’m a writer and world-traveler. But in my previous life, I was a media executive. At thirty-five years old, at the height of my career in that world, I felt an emptiness – a lack of meaning in my life. I decided to quit and retreat to a family country house in order to figure out my next steps. I soon realized that I was experiencing a full-blown midlife crisis and started reading a lot of books in order to understand my predicament. I ended up reading for four years before finally deciding to travel around the world. The following books are the ones that helped me the most; I recommend them to others who are entering this crucial period of life.
This is the best book ever written about the midlife crisis. Although only 117 pages long, it is dense with meaning, and multiple readings are necessary to truly get the most out of it. Hollis is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst whose thought is permeated by Jung’s theories. His writing is very beautiful and often literary. He draws from psychology, poetry, art, his own practical experience, and much more. Hollis elucidates the difference between a job and a vocation, explains the relationship between fear and growth, shows how solitude differs from loneliness, and above all, gives us the best map to transmute midlife misery into meaning. Hollis’s understanding of the human condition is astonishing.
Author James Hollis' eloquent reading provides the listener with an accessible and yet profound understanding of a universal condition - or what is commonly referred to as the mid-life crisis. The book shows how we may travel this Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.
Laura Freeman is a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honoree. Her work has been recognized with an NAACP Image Award, reached the New York Times Best Seller List, been honored by the Society of Illustrators, the Georgia Center For The Book, and in the Annuals for Communication Arts and American Illustration. She has illustrated over thirty children’s books, most of them biographies.
This stunning book was published in 1995, but it is still one of my favorites. Tom Feelings’ black and white illustrations are haunting and powerful. It wordlessly tells and shows the story of the tortuous journey of the slaves brought from Africa to the Americas. Words are not needed with images this powerful.
Alex Haley's Roots awakened many Americans to the cruelty of slavery. The Middle Passage focuses attention on the torturous journey which brought slaves from Africa to the Americas, allowing readers to bear witness to the sufferings of an entire people.
I chose to study creative nonfiction during my MFA program so I could learn what makes great memoirs work, but I first fell in love with the genre as a teenager, when I picked up Angela’s Ashes off my mom’s bedside table. I’m grateful for the way memoir gives me a window into the lives of people of other races, religions, abilities, experiences, and even other centuries.While my book The Place We Make isn’t only a memoir—it’s a blend of memoir and historical biography—it was my desire to both understand the view through my research subject’s eyes, and analyze how I was seeing the world myself, that drove me to write it.
I sometimes think of memoir as a modern genre, but the truth is that people have been writing about their own lives for thousands of years.
This 1789 account begins with Olaudah Equiano’s day-to-day life growing up in the kingdom of Benin, Africa, and then describes his crossing the Atlantic Ocean via the Middle Passage and subsequent enslavement.
When I first read this book in college, it was the beginning of my realization that the people in history were people with whom I share all the same range of emotions and motivations that comes with being human. This book instilled in me a desire to understand the people of the past.
A first-person narrative of Olaudah Equiano's journey from his native Africa to the New World, that follows his capture, introduction to Christianity and eventual release. His story is an eye-opening depiction of personal resilience in the face of structural oppression.
Olaudah Equiano's origins are rooted in West Africa's Eboe district, which is modern-day Nigeria. He details the shocking events that led up to his kidnapping and subsequent trade into slavery. His journey starts at 11 years old, forcing him to come of age in a society that abuses him at every turn. During his plight, he attempts to find new…
Dr. Onyeka Nubia is a pioneering and internationally recognised historian, writer, and presenter. He is reinventing our perceptions of diversity, the Renaissance, and British history. Onyeka is the leading historian on the status and origins of Africans in pre-colonial England from antiquity to 1603. He has helped academia and the general public to entirely new perspectives on otherness, colonialism, imperialism, and World Wars I and II.
He has written over fifty articles on Englishness, Britishness, and historical method and they have appeared in the most popular UK historical magazines and periodicals including History Today and BBC History Magazine. Onyeka has been a consultant and presenter for several television programmes on BBC.
Northup provocatively challenges our perceptions of the early modern world. By offering a relativist view and investigating the primary sources written by Africans themselves — the Africans of the early modern period. They reveal much about sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, as well as African civilizations.
This groundbreaking book examines the full range of African-European encounters from an unfamiliar African perspective rather than from the customary European one. By featuring vivid life stories of individual Africans and drawing upon their many recorded sentiments, David Northrup presents African perspectives that persuasively challenge stereotypes about African-European relations as they unfolded in Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic world between 1450 and 1850. The text features thematically organized chapters that explore first impressions, religion and politics, commerce and culture, imported goods and technology, the Middle Passage, and Africans in Europe. In addition, Northrup offers a thoughtful examination of Africans' relations…
