Customer Reviews

Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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~

The first half of this book is pretty interesting but quickly deteriorates into a narcissictic ramble about the author's life...hardly about the plane crash

In December 1979 author Robert Sabbag was riding the wave of success; he was, as he tells us, "half a celebrity" following the publication of his first book, Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade. Traveling from LaGuardia Airport to his new home on Cape Cod, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on Air New England Flight 248. Two miles from its destination at Hyannis, the plane came down too steeply out of the fog and crashed into a remote wooded area. The pilot, who had been pulled out of semi-retirement to fly too many hours with too few breaks, was killed, while the copilot and the eight passengers survived with various injuries. In the blackness of the winter night, the survivors helped each other out of the fuel-drenched plane and secured their own rescue, since the airline had no idea where they were. Sabbag recuperated and went on with his life. What was he looking for when, twenty-seven years later, he began to research and write Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival?

None of the passengers had kept in contact over the years. The crash was NOT, he writes, a "group experience. In the end, survival never is. The trauma is so personal, so individual, and one's response to it is so solitary, that opening it up to varying interpretations threatens the equilibrium that each of us independenty strives to recapture." He interviewed those who were willing and found that none of them had come away unscathed. His research covered the expected ground of post-traumatic stress disorder and the neuroscience of memories. He recreates the context of his life at the time, the fast-track company of the cocaine dealers who were the subject of "Snowblind," his close family ties. He draws the conclusion that after nearly thirty years, his memory of that awful night has seasoned and he is at peace.

"Down Around Midnight" is not a suspense story book, nor is it a disaster story. The plane hits the treetops in the third paragraph of the book, and Sabbag devotes the remaining 211 pages to exploring and interpreting what it meant to the survivors and especially to himself, questioning his claim on life after falling from the sky and failing to die. Yet I found it impossible to put down, reading it around a busy work schedule in every moment I could spare until I turned over the last deeply satisfying page. The tight, punchy writing style makes this one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time. As a fascinating story, as an exploration of response to trauma, as a personal odyssey, replete with social and geographical history, saying in 212 pages what a less skilled writer would try to say in 500, this is a book that works. Highly recommended.

Linda Bulger, 2009

This is a riveting account of the after effects of a cataclysmic event---a deadly plane crash the author had the good fortune to survive.

It examines how such events warp and haunt one's life thereafter in ways only dimly understood at the time.

It is not a happy tale, but one which sheds light on dark corners of our existence rarely glimpsed by those who have not personally experienced.

While I was left deeply unsatisfied in the end---the book feels unfinished; much we wish to know the author didn't delve into---but it is a riveting read.

Down Around Midnight is a memoir of crash and survival, by Robert Sabbag, the author of Snowblind. As someone who only reads non-fiction and truly enjoys most memoirs, I was really looking forward to reading this book. I am sad to say that after two weeks of trying, I just can't finish it.

In 1979, Air New England Flight 248 bound for Cape Cod, crashed into the woods, killing the pilot, injuring the co-pilot and eight passengers on board. This book describes the rescue and aftermath of the crash, and then jumps to 30 thirty-years after and investigates the survivors and how the crash affected their lives.

As someone who has had to overcome the fear of flying, the crash details didn't calm my anxiety. Especially with the recent air disaster - Continental Connection Flight 3407 - that killed more than 50 persons this past February. In both cases, the cause was most certainly pilot error related to inadequate training and fatigue.

Down Around Midnight was written well but there just isn't enough to the story to write a book, in my opinion. A magazine article, perhaps. A newspaper story, absolutely. But not a book. In my opinion, there just isn't enough to write about. There was certainly some post traumatic stress disorder involved with the passengers, but just not enough to hold my interest. Try as I might, I just can't finish it.

When I read the synopsis of this book, I thought it was going to be a great story. It comes from a highly acclaimed author (Snowblind, 1976) who actually survived a plane crash. You'd think that would be a recipe for success. Unfortunately, I found the telling of the crash very technical, and the subsequent interviews with his fellow survivors... clinical. It was actually really odd. For experiencing something so rare and intense, it seemed emotionless and detached. I wanted to enjoy it - I really did. It unfortunately just isn't a book that I could recommend.

The book was ok. Other than the fact that the author survived the crash, which is remarkable and of which I respect him immensely, the writing and descriptions in the book were nothing special. Frankly, the fact that he waited twenty years to write about this event, makes me wonder if time and memory didn't deteriorate in those ensuing years. The writing is done from a very clinical point of view, in my opinion. It is certainly not a book I would read again.

I thought this would be a good disaster book,but only a relatively few pages dealt with the plane crash,and even then there was nothing very unique about the crash.Almost the whole book is devoted to the rambling thoughts of the author,and to a lesser extent of the other victims,with no great philosophies or insights.There is also boring descriptions of the geography of the places he visits.The back cover of the book has 7 complimentary statements,but they are for another book he wrote(about the drug trade)!This would have been a good short story for Readers Digest,but not for a 200+ page book.