{"id":5111,"date":"2018-09-26T19:50:31","date_gmt":"2018-09-26T23:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=5111"},"modified":"2018-09-26T19:50:31","modified_gmt":"2018-09-26T23:50:31","slug":"a-sad-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/a-sad-read\/","title":{"rendered":"A SAD READ"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently read \u201cI Am, I Am, I Am\u201d by Maggie O\u2019Farrell.\u00a0 What caught my eye was the subtitle, \u201cSeventeen Brushes With Death.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a straight autobiography by a strong novelist born in Ireland in 1972, who grew up in Scotland and Wales.\u00a0 Being a quarter Scottish and a quarter Irish myself on my mother\u2019s side, and having spent pleasant time in Scotland and Wales, I wanted to relate with her.\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Her writing style can keep you captivated, despite the occasional intrusive roar of a Thesaurus Rex: \u201cThe water is black: an absolute dark, this, an ur-dark, aphotic, without a glimmer of light.\u201d The title, she explains, comes from the doomed Sylvia Plath in \u201cThe Bell Jar\u201d: \u201cI took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is much cooler than my own feelings after near-death experiences, which tended more toward \u201c(Expletive deleted)! I\u2019m still alive!\u201d Lub-dup, lub-dup, lub-dup.<\/p>\n

Ms. O\u2019Farrell\u2019s experiences are compellingly recalled.\u00a0 What I look for in such things is what went through the person\u2019s mind when it happened, and what lessons they learned that they could share with others.\u00a0 It\u2019s the theme of the Ayoob Files column I\u2019ve written for thirty years for American Handgunner <\/em>magazine.\u00a0 (https:\/\/americanhandgunner.com\/category\/the-ayoob-files\/ ). I would give her an \u201cA\u201d for the first: she is skilled at the writer\u2019s craft, and makes you feel as if you\u2019re going through each ordeal with her.\u00a0 For the second, though, I\u2019d have to give it a grade of \u201cincomplete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of her travails \u2013 illness, troubled pregnancies with much-wanted babies, miscarriages \u2013 simply could not have been avoided.\u00a0 When she\u2019s on an airliner that falls from the skies but is barely recovered by a skillful pilot, she is banged up some by the violent turbulence, but doesn\u2019t seem to mention the importance of her having had her seat belt on no matter what the seat belt light said \u2013 the likely reason that less careful passengers were injured far worse than she.<\/p>\n

Given what I do for a living, what struck me most were her two experiences with violent criminals.\u00a0 The creepy stranger on the walking path who put a camera strap around her neck and she was lucky enough <\/span>\u00a0damn <\/em>lucky enough to talk her way out of it, discovering later that he was the prime suspect in the strangulation murder of another young woman in the area. The mugger in a third world country who put a blade to her throat.\u00a0 She blows off the self-defense class she had taken earlier \u2013 and, she admits, had not taken seriously \u2013 and never explores how situational awareness and self-defense knowledge might have served her better than blind luck. She makes it clear that she is unrepentantly proud of being a risk-taker since childhood, having nearly drowned more than once, and one of those times while holding her toddler.\u00a0 It is left to the reader to think, \u201cLady, what was going through your mind?!?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, I realize she\u2019s a child of the UK in modern times, and I know what you\u2019re thinking: the Spitfire pilots who rose against the Luftwaffe and the longbowmen of Agincourt must roll in their graves at such mindset.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Am, I Am, I Am\u201d is a riveting read.\u00a0 But the absence of learning from some of these near-death experiences makes me sad, sad, sad.<\/p>\n

Available on Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read \u201cI Am, I Am, I Am\u201d by Maggie O\u2019Farrell.\u00a0 What caught my eye was the subtitle, \u201cSeventeen Brushes With Death.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a straight autobiography by a strong novelist born in Ireland in 1972, who grew up in Scotland and Wales.\u00a0 Being a quarter Scottish and a quarter Irish myself on my mother\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5111","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5113,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111\/revisions\/5113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}