The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife

↻ 2026-07-27

Extremely compact. It’s a bit over a hundred pages and there’s nothing padding it out, no anecdote stretched to fill a chapter, no idea restated three times for the benefit of an imagined skimmer. Hollis says the thing and moves on. I wish more books in this territory were built this way, and the parsimony is a good part of why this one is useful.

It’s Jungian, and if that’s going to bother you it will bother you early. It didn’t bother me.

Not every reader is going to relate to every element of the middle passage Hollis illuminates. Some of what he describes is plainly someone else’s life and not mine. That seems like the right expectation to bring to a book of this kind rather than a flaw in it. What’s here is practical, and there’s an element of being seen in it, at least in part, which is most of what I’d ask for.

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