Word: midnighters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...million. But should you live through one - possibly as a gesture toward cosmic compensation - your shot at a book deal goes way up. There are two new memoirs out by survivors of plane crashes: Ollestad's Crazy for the Storm (Ecco; 272 pages) and Robert Sabbag's Down Around Midnight (Viking; 214 pages). Starbucks has picked Ollestad's memoir for its book program, and you can see why: plane crashes are usually unknowable, secret events. We may never find the black box from Air France Flight 447, lost off the coast of Brazil on June 1. But from these crashes...
...back and pelvis snapped on impact. He survived - along with the co-pilot and the other seven passengers, though not the pilot - and even learned to walk again. But he never escaped a sense that his life had been broken neatly in two at that moment. In Down Around Midnight, Sabbag seeks out his fellow travelers in an attempt to figure out exactly what happened that night - and what it meant...
...crash, he was already a published author, and he has a knack for thumbnail portraits and sardonic humor, whereas Ollestad's prose has a more breathless, unpolished, confessional quality. But Sabbag's book, while more eloquent, is less complete. If there is a tragedy in Down Around Midnight, it is not of the Greek kind - Sabbag's bad luck was purely random, and if there was a fatal flaw involved, it wasn't his. He circles and circles around the trauma, interviewing his fellow victims, and their relatives, and even the emergency workers who beat a trail through the woods...
...last week, I was cut off from most forms of communication altogether: mobile-phone text-messaging had already been blocked on the day of the election, and as the week went on, the entire mobile network was cut off from about late afternoon until midnight, the time when most demonstrations were being staged, making information-gathering from would-be participants impossible. Later, Internet connections were reduced to snail speed, and satellite television was almost entirely jammed. It was becoming impossible to report on events. The only "news" left unblocked was that propagated by state television. (See pictures of the turbulent...
...punched, while Zhang, also roughed up during their arrest, was locked in a cage. Their transgression? They were representing the family of Jiang Xiqing, a man who belonged to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. After a few hours of questioning, the Jiangjin district police released them around midnight. "We were scared, but the people [we represented] were even more scared," says Li. "So we went back the next...