Book review—Crazy for the Storm

When 11-year-old Norman Ollestad boards a chartered airplane with his father, Norman Sr., and his father’s girlfriend, Sandra, en route to a ski championship ceremony in the California mountains, he experiences a feeling of deep contentment. As the small plane cruises over rocky peaks, young Norman realizes he’s finally becoming an elite athlete—his father’s pushing, goading, cajoling, and encouragement has paid off. He is well on his way to achieving his dad’s dream of a full athletic scholarship to an Ivy League college. But fate has another plan in store for the father-son duo. Without warning, the plane slams into a storm-battered mountainside. Young Norman is the only person who makes it off the mountain alive, shimmying down thousands of feet of ice and snow clad only in a sweater, jeans, and sneakers. In his memoir Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival (P.S.), Ollestad attributes his survival to one factor: his father. A gifted writer whose work is lauded for its Hemingwayesque qualities, Ollestad recounts the disaster in a spare, insightful voice. In alternating chapters, he recalls his early life as a child of divorce growing up in Southern California beach culture. Ollestad’s father, an FBI agent turned lawyer, is the unequivocal North Star of his life: a fearless, relentlessly optimistic charmer who is completely devoted to his son. Beginning at age one, young Norman is launched into a world of extreme adventure: surfing ever bigger waves, skiing ever steeper mountains, pushing past pain and fear to find the bliss of an adrenaline-fueled moment—it is the only way his father knows how to live, and little Norman is along for the ride. After his father’s death, Ollestad spirals down into a lonely, anger-charged adolescence, but finds redemption in the surf culture that he’d never fully embraced before the accident. This is a story of survival on many levels, and it’s an extremely satisfying read.

Tagged as: Norman Ollestad, skiing, surfing, Survival