Itemize Books Conducive To 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) |
Norman Ollestad
Hardcover | Pages: 272 pages Rating: 3.6 | 5146 Users | 864 Reviews
Specify Appertaining To 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 | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 272 pages |
| Published | : | June 2nd 2009 by Ecco (first published 2009) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Biography. Adventure. Survival |
Commentary 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.”Rating Appertaining To Books Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Ratings: 3.6 From 5146 Users | 864 ReviewsJudge Appertaining To 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 theA 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
Ok this should have been a good book - a great book but it wasn't. I think you could've read the little blurb on the front cover and been good. It was about a boy involved in a plane crash with his father and father's girlfriend (true story) and the 11 year old boy at the time (the now 40 something author) was the only one to survive. Interesting and intriguing right? Wrong. The story was pretty much told in the first chapter and the rest of the book went back and forth between him getting down
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
Like father/son books? How about surfing books? Downhill racing? Wilderness adventure? CRAZY FOR THE STORM is all of the above rolled into one. Big Norman, a definite throwback to the overbearing, pushy, loving dad, pushes Little Norman to the limit. The L'il guy loves to hate it (or hates to love it, maybe), but it all helps him to survive major hardship in the end. That is, Boy Wonder survives the Chapter One plane crash that takes his dad. Back and forth go the alternating chapters between
In this fast, engaging tale Norman Ollestad tells about how he survived a mountaintop plane crash as an 11-year-old, a crash that killed the pilot, his father and his fathers girlfriend, and how his relationship with his father, and the skills he had learned under his tutelage, had prepared him for his near-death ordeal. Norman Ollestad - image from Counterpoint PressOllestad tells of his upbringing, of his charismatic surfer/lawyer/coach father who drove him to peaks of physical performance he
Obviously, if you read a memoir by a plane crash survivor theres no suspense as to whether or not he survived but what Ollestad does so well is alternate short, concisely written chapters about key moments in his life leading up to this with the scenario he is faced with on the mountain. He really gets inside the mentality that was needed to believe that he could survive and how this was instilled in him, often in ways that he wasnt so happy about at the time, by his dad who pushed him to excel
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