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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"This trail did not exist", May 2, 2009
This review is from: Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival (Hardcover)
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After reading Robert Sabbag's superbly economical prose, some cutting to the chase seems in order. Down Around Midnight is one of the best books I've read this year and one of the very best memoirs I've ever read. In the avalanche of Woe-Is-Me memoirs that the publishing industry seems determined to foist upon us this book is a rarity - a tale of tragedy and introspection that actually has meaning. Sabbag asks us, simply, to consider what it means to be lucky. I'm sure that many people like myself whose work requires an amount of airplane travel are fascinated by aviation accidents. Whether that fascination is purely morbid, a twisted hope that one can study up for the big event or just an outlet for fear I don't claim to know. I do know that after a two emergency landings and several unpleasant severe turbulence experiences I've wondered more than once what it would be like to be in a plane crash. What would it feel like? What would I do? Robert Sabbag delivers the answers for his experience right up front. If he's going to tell a story about a plane crash he's not going to hide the main event for last. And that should give you a good idea of the kind of story teller he is: no nonsense, no tricks, and definitely no BS. This is a "slim volume" as the saying goes so it's difficult to talk about it without giving too much away. Sabbag's story is about talking to other survivors of the crash to sort out what happened from what he remembers happened. Along the way he tells us about NTSB investigations, the glory that was the old Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, g-force, cross directories, life on Cape Cod and the mysteries of memory. Not only does Sabbag never whine - whether he's talking about learning to walking again after a broken pelvis or grappling with "Survivor's Guilt" - he makes this story enjoyable. He balances the tragedy with a genuine enjoyment of life and the people in his life. He doesn't cut himself any slack either, when he says "I was a bigger jerk than usual", you believe it. Still, you wouldn't mind sitting down at a Cape Cod bar for a cold one with Sabbag, he's good company. It's one thing to physically survive an airplane crash, it's quite another to be able to make sense of the events and emotions surrounding it all while telling a compelling and accessible story. Sabbag succeeds on all fronts. This is a book I know I'll be recommending as a smart beach read for this year and years to come.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Planes crash. People survive. But few can spin a tale of survival this compelling., May 19, 2009
This review is from: Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival (Hardcover)
I met Bob Sabbag a few months before he moved to Cape Cod. He still showed up in New York to see friends and work his book; plane fares were cheap then, so he flew. One June night in 1979, he had the extreme bad luck to be flying with a pilot who should not have been at the controls. Two miles from the Hyannis airport, the pilot made a tragic decision and pushed the commuter plane under the fog: "The plane hit the trees at 123 knots. It lost its wings as it crashed. They were sheared off, taking the fuel tanks with them, as the plane slammed through the forest. In an explosion of tearing sheet metal, it ripped a path through the timber, cutting thick stands of oak and pine for a distance of three hundred feet.... The seat belt held up. Nothing else did. I hit the belt with such force that I took the seat forward with me, ripping it right out of the fuselage." The plane was in a forest that was hard to reach from a road --- not that anyone at the airport, two-and-a-half miles away, knew where it was. The pilot was dead, several passengers were trapped. Sabbag had a broken pelvis and couldn't walk. Oh, and there was a good chance the wreck would catch on fire. The first great story of that night is about the young woman who went for help and the subsequent rescue of the injured passengers. The second is about Bob Sabbag's reaction to his near-death experience, which was pretty much none --- he recovered in the hospital, returned to his house and got on with his life. Indeed, he downplayed the crash so completely that I never thought to drive up and see him in the hospital; when I visited him that winter, I don't recall we talked about that night at all. That's typical Sabbag. As he writes, "I've been all over the world, I've made hundreds of friends, and I've bought maybe three rolls of film in my life." So Sabbag's denial --- let's call it by its rightful name --- lasted for 27 years. A book? "It is not something that suggested itself to me," he says, "and I have a literary agent." 'Down Around Midnight' is Sabbag's belated effort to find out what happened that night. Across the years, he reaches out to the seven other passengers, investigates the pilot and his spotty flying record, and deals with his own long suppressed feelings. What he finds is surprising but not exactly remarkable: a string of coincidences that reveal unlikely links between strangers, life choices changed by the flight, the kind of stuff that might make a writer --- though not Bob Sabbag --- believe in a God who monitors even the wings of butterflies. But the reason to spend a few hours with these 210 pages is the writing. If you've read "Snowblind", you know that Sabbag is a magnificent craftsman. His books are short on verbiage, long on anecdote --- he's a born storyteller, and he plays to his strength. Reading him, for me, is like sitting at his kitchen table in the Old Days: Sabbag drinking one cup of black coffee after another, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, and talking. And what talk! Is there wisdom? You bet: "You don't recover, you simply recuperate. Belief in the proposition that `What doesn't kill you makes you stronger' is just another form of denial." Is there the sentence that stops you cold? Of course: "She had a voice so soft you could sleep in it." And never, for all the talent, does he show off: "I've made the intimate acquaintance of a lot of people who give the concept of dangerous behavior new meaning. I've witnessed it as practiced by the world's most serious professionals. I've watched the playoffs. And believe me, I don't qualify." I envy the talent that composed those sentences --- and all the others I've marked in a book that is, for me, a model memoir. Not, as I say, for what happens, because in a Bob Sabbag book, what happens is the booby prize. What you learn about writing and thinking and seeing --- that's, as we now say, priceless.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not All That Engaging..., May 5, 2009
This review is from: Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Wow. You would think this book would be interesting. It's about a terrible crash that came close to killing everyone onboard. There's a plane screaming to a halt in a woods cloaked with dense fog and no moon. The author, Robert Sabbag, has his back broken as the seat belt he wore stayed buckled, but the seat itself was thrown free of it's connections to the fuselage. He and the other injured survivors stagger out into the black night, doused with aviation fuel.... These events were ultimately so traumatic that the author couldn't write about it for decades. And when he did, he went back to talk to the people who had been there. You would think it would be interesting... but it's not. (At least not for me) I chose this book because I have recently read some stunningly good autobiographical books. One was Donovan Campbell's "Joker One". Another was Tori McClure's "Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean". In the first case the story was about a Marine Platoon in Iraq. In the second, McClure's story about rowing across the Atlantic. Yes rowing. And it was so good. So I figured a plane crash, a seasoned author, that had drama, pathos, and be worth reading. I thought that after decades of consideration that the author's analysis would be deep and thoughtful-- that I could learn something about humans in terrible situations. What I found was reporting. A too brief explanation of what occurred that night followed by too much detail about the wrong things. I didn't, and don't care, for example, about the subsequent careers of the young people on board that flight. I was happy for them that they graduated from University X and that they now had more than one house, but honestly I was looking for more about the consequences of what they, uniquely, experienced. There is an effort to dig out this information. Sabbag knew what he was looking for, but how he presented the information left me cold and unaffected. I was not drawn in to care. So for me, Down Around Midnight was not a great read. If after this review though you are still interested I'd suggest looking at one of Mr. Sabbag's others books which have a 'Look Inside' excerp and see if his writing style appeals to you. Or, of course, there's the library. I can't suggest this as a buy though. Pam T~
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