Middle Passage
Why do so many go through so much disruption in their middle years? Why then? Why do we consider it to be a crisis? The Middle Passage presents us with an opportunity to reexamine our lives and to ask: "Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?" It is an occasion for redefining and reorienting the personality, a necessary rite of passage between the extended adolescence of the first adulthood and our inevitable appointment with old age and mortality. The Middle Passage addresses the following issues: How did we acquire our original sense of self? What are the changes that herald the Middle Passage? How does one revision the sense of self? What is the relationship between Jung's concept of individuation and our commitment to others? What attitudes and behavior support individuation and help us move from misery to meaning? This book shows how we may travel the Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer. --back cover
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Middle Passage
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Jungian analyst writes about the midlife crisis as a passage rather than a breakdown, and offers a structured account of the second-half-of-life work of letting go of borrowed identities and finding your own.
Multiple books share this title. The most commonly searched is Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (1990), a literary novel about a freed slave on an illegal slave ship. The metadata above lists James Hollis, who has written different works.
Yes. Middle Passage won the 1990 National Book Award for Fiction. It is widely considered one of Johnson's masterworks and a landmark in African American literature.
Middle Passage is 127 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Middle Passage takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
Middle Passage is a standalone novel by James Hollis, not part of a series.
Middle Passage is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.