"In Atlantic City, I touched base with my 'timeless' self. Watching my children at play, I experienced my youth, and that of my mother and grandmother." --Myna German

"Part of midlife is making peace with where you come from, getting more information, as if to splice together pieces of the past before moving on." --Myna German

"Erv will keep the car in the garage where it is safe. And so is he. Part of me is resentful, lamenting his lack of adventure, holding on to old attachments, as if his life depended on them. But part of me is happy. Just like he holds on to the car, I know he will always hold onto me, forgoing newer models." --Myna German

"In Atlantic City, I touched base with my 'timeless' self," writes Myna German-Schleifer. "Watching my children at play, I experienced my youth, and that of my mother and grandmother. The year could have been 1959, when I was seven like Henry [her son]; it could have been 1930, when my mother, Leatrice, was seven; or 1903, when my grandmother, Sophie, was seven years old."

German-Schleifer's vivid and poignant nostalgia is just one reason I find her book, Booming into Midlife, so appealing. It's hard to read her reflections without thinking of and reliving some of one's own past.

To German-Schleifer, thinking about the past is important emotional work for midlifers. "Part of midlife is making peace with where you come from, getting more information, as if to splice together pieces of the past before moving on," she writes.

And so German-Schleifer's book chronicles here own life journey--from Philadelphia where she grew up in a large extended family of Ukrainian immigrants, to rural New Hampshire where she lived as a young graduate student and hippie wanabe, to Boston where she lived as an adult single and entered the business world, to New York City where she received an MBA and tried her hand on Wall Street, to her present home in the suburban community of Hartsdale, New York where, in her mid-40s, she works as a freelance writer and, with her husband, raises two young children.

German-Schleifer's candor and self-depreciation is refreshing. For instance, in deciding to leave her New Hampshire boyfriend, she admits, "Tom is part of my rebellion. For me, being a hippie is a phase of life . . . while, for Tom, it is his very being." Similarly, German-Schleifer owns up to her lack ("despite my fancy degrees") of aptitude for number-crunching in her Wall Street position. When her boss explained that she was more of an "ideas" person than a "numbers" person, she writes,

"He was right. I was out of my league. I looked for a new position, but I was already typecast. Since I had a numbers' job, I could only get a numbers' job. But since I was lousy at it, I had to avoid it. It was a tough bind, but I found a time-honored solution: get pregnant. Henry was born nine months later."

German-Schleifer's flashes of wit are like that: brief, unexpected, and sometimes insightful. I like a passage where she tells about her lawyer-husband Erv, who has trouble discarding things, including the 1969 Cadillac he learned to drive in. "Erv will keep the car in the garage where it is safe," writes German-Schleifer. "And so is he. Part of me is resentful, lamenting his lack of adventure, holding on to old attachments, as if his life depended on them. But part of me is happy. Just like he holds on to the car, I know he will always hold onto me, forgoing newer models."

There is much more to German-Schleifer's book. She gives good advice about midlife career changes (she calls it "reinventing the dream") and midlife marriages (she believes spouses need "separate psychological lives" and the freedom to pursue unrelated career paths). Also German-Schleifer uses her book to tell interesting and helpful stories other than her own, including one about a working mother, a stay-at-home mom, a Stock Exchange trader turned bagel store owner, a neighbor lady involved in a midlife affair, and her son Henry's yard sale.

Booming into Midlife is published by Kroshka Books, Commack, New York.