Word: sabbag
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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...
...Sabbag was even unluckier than Ollestad, if that's possible. In 1979 - four months after Ollestad's crash - Sabbag was on an Air New England flight that went down in a trackless forest just short of the airport on Cape Cod. There was no warning. "I breathed in," he remembers, "and when I breathed out I was pulling six Gs." His 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...
...Sabbag is more of a writer than Ollestad. At the time of the 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...
...list tighter, to make the quality higher, to publish every book on the list as well as I can." And "well" means something different for Canongate than it does for any other house. Byng reedited the early chapters of Pi with Martel, and for Snowblind, a book by Robert Sabbag about drug smuggling, he produced a limited edition, complete with a Damien Hirst drug kit - mirror, razor blade and $100 bill. Invited to Buckingham Palace for a literary evening, Byng talked his way into an introduction to the Queen and presented her with a volume, drug...
...Snowblind, a 1976 study of cocaine dealing that has become something of a cult book, Robert Sabbag wrote: "Cocaine, like motorcycles, machine guns and White House politics, is, among many things, a virility substitute. Its mere possession imparts status-cocaine equals money, and money equals power. And, as if in mute imitation of its symbolism, cocaine's presence in the blood, like no other drug, accounts for a feeling of confidence that is rare in the behavioral sink of post-industrial America...