The Book: Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival, by Norman Ollestad
The Story: Yet another survival story. That’s kind of been my “thing” for the last month or so, no idea why. I don’t have any more in my pile, so this may be my last one for awhile, but I’ve probably read 5 or so recently. Weird.
Anyway, in this one, the narrator (who was 11 at the time), his father, and his father’s girlfriend are all on a small airplane when the pilot slams them into the side of a mountain. There is a pretty bad storm going on and Norman is pretty much left on his own to get out of this thing. His survival and his journey down this mountain make up about half of this book.
The other half is the story of Norman’s life up to that point. He grew up in this spontaneous, crazy surf culture in Malibu and his father pushed him into surfing and skiing from a very young age. His parents divorced when he was younger but he maintained a decent relationship with both his mom and his dad. The relationship with is dad is focused on a lot and the lessons that his dad taught him come to his mind over and over as he gets down this horrible, snowy mountain.
While this is a story of survival, that kind of takes a back seat to the story of Norman’s life and the relationship that he had with his father.
What I Thought: Ok, so I know that the father-son relationship was an important part of the story, but it is bad for me to say that I just really didn’t care? I thought that his dad put him in pretty scary situations from the time that he was very young just so that he could live vicariously though his son. To be honest, his dad’s “drive” is what got them smashed into the side of a mountain in the first place- flying all over for skiing and surfing that Norman, at that point, wasn’t even super enthusiastic about. Meh. It made me not really like his dad, so those father-son parts just kind of irritated me.
The other thing that kind of made this a harder read for me was all the skiing and surfing terms that were seriously everywhere. I am not at all familiar with either sport and I had a hard time picturing what was happening about 90% of the time. Even when he was coming down the mountain, there were tons of skiing terms and I never did really develop a picture in my mind of the area that he was trekking through.
These two little issues aside, I did enjoy this book. I thought that the survival story was completely crazy and even though I knew going into it that it was survival story, I kept crossing my fingers that Norman would live. I thought that he did a good job of keeping the story short and concise and not adding a ton of filler for the sake of making a longer book. I kind of have a thing for honest, bare-bones writing and Noman Ollestad pulled it off oh so well.
Conclusion: A decent survival story, but not the best. You will probably get more out of it if you are at least vaguely familiar with surfing and skiing, which I am not. If you want some serious mountain survival, I’m going to have to point you to Into Thin Air.