Word: midnight
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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...
...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...
Sleep researchers refer to these early risers as larks (midnight-oil-burners are known as owls), and new data presented this week at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies suggest that a student's preferred sleeping schedule has a lot to do with his or her grade-point average in school. In one study, psychologists at Hendrix College in Arkansas found that college freshmen who kept night-owl hours had lower GPAs than early birds. Another group at the University of Pittsburgh revealed that poor sleep habits among high-schoolers led to lower grades, particularly in math. (See pictures...