Norman Ollestad
Hardcover | Pages: 272 pages Rating: 3.6 | 5146 Users | 864 Reviews
List Books During Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
| Original Title: | Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival |
| ISBN: | 0061766720 (ISBN13: 9780061766725) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Pennsylvania Young Readers' Choice Award Nominee (2011) |
Narration Toward Books Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Ollestad, 41, was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing at a very young age by the father he idolized. Resentful of a childhood lost to his father’s reckless and demanding adventures, young Ollestad was often paralyzed by fear. Set in Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, the book captures the earthy surf culture of Southern California; the boy’s conflicted feelings for his magnetic father; and the exhilarating tests of skill in the surf and snow that prepared young Norman to become a fearless surfer and ski champion--which ultimately saved his life.In February 1979, just as he was reaping the rewards of his training, a chartered Cessna carrying Norman, his father, his father’s girlfriend, and the pilot, crashed into the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California and was suspended at eight thousand feet, engulfed in a blizzard. Norman’s father, his coach and hero, was dead, and the 11-year old Ollestad had to descend the mountain alone and grief-stricken, through snow and ice, without any gear.
Stunningly, the boy defied the elements and put his father’s passionate lessons to work. As he told the LA Times after his ordeal, “My dad told me never to give up.”
Identify About Books Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
| Title | : | Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival |
| Author | : | Norman Ollestad |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 272 pages |
| Published | : | June 2nd 2009 by Ecco (first published 2009) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Biography. Adventure. Survival |
Rating About Books Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Ratings: 3.6 From 5146 Users | 864 ReviewsArticle About Books Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
This is a tough book to both rate [I am rating it a high 3] and review. If you rate it low, you are a heartless person who cares little about a little boy who barely survived a plane crash that kills everyone else on board and if you rate it high, you are saying that it is well-written, riveting and that the audiobook [IF that is how you are experiencing this book] is also excellent and in this case, this would be somewhat of a lie. There are moments that are riveting [the crash itself and theOpening Line: February 19,1979. At seven that morning my dad, his girlfriend Sandra and I took off from Santa Monica Airport headed for the mountains of Big Bear.Set amid the wild uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, Crazy For The Storm is a fascinating memoir that was hard to put down. It centers around 11 year old Norman Ollestad and the complicated relationship he had with his father. Demanding, charismatic and free-spirited, it is ultimately the thrill-seeking
A skinny memoir in search of an editor. How does one tell a 272 page story of a plane-crash in which your father, his girl-friend, and the pilot die and only you, an eleven-year old, survive, and somehow manage to continually and ultimately bore the reader to distraction? (He writes this 27 years after the event.) I learned self-serving banalities about surfboards, skiing, teenage parties, and on and on but precious little about the pre-crash/crash specifics. Not even a simple fleshing-out of
Raising a child this way? Abysmal attitudes. A bunch of irresponsible people who should not have been allowed to touch a child with a seven-foot pole. Beating, recklessly endangering a minor, emotinal trauma - we have it all inflicted on this child. What's even worse is that the author, the grown-up version of this child seems to be thinking it was all ok! I'm not gonna spoil it but this gives us a story of a whole lot more horrible childhood than even The Glass Castle. And that goes to say
I find myself disliking the subject of most memoirs, the author. This generally means that I don't typicallay read them ... why hang out with some self indulgent, egocentric, narcissist for hours and hours while they talk about their favorite subject: themselves? I didn't like hanging out with jeanette Walls, I really didn't like hanging out with Elizabeth Gilbert and, most recently, I ultimately didn't like the author of Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven because, of course, the book concludes
Though not quite as boastful or badly written, this book reminded me a lot of A Million Little Pieces (a book I abhor, and not for any of the reasons Oprah slammed it--please, all nonfiction is, to some degree, untrue, particularly memoir. I'm surprised that more people weren't offended by Frey's atrociously bad writing--I could barely read a quarter of the book, and I really tried to get through it. But that's another review . . . ) Crazy for the Storm chronicles eleven-year-old Ollestad's
As others have commented, this book can be a bit frustrating in its structure, given that it "bills" itself as a survival story, yet keeps alternating to chapters about the author's earlier childhood that are significantly longer than the survival chapters. Yet, perhaps this imbalance is a necessity, considering that the survival ordeal only lasted 11 (albeit harrowing) hours. But really, the book is centered around a compelling contradiction: it is his father's very reckless passion for life
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