Norman Ollestad reads his own audiobook, and that single fact governs everything else about the recording. The voice describing an eleven-year-old alone on an icy mountain in February 1979 belongs to the person who was on it. Ecco published seven hours and thirty-eight minutes of it on June 2, 2009, and the description opens not with a summary but with a scrap of remembered dialogue between a boy and a father who keeps promising that one day it will all be beautiful. Memoirs read by their authors are common enough. Memoirs read by the survivor at their center are not.
Richard A. Leveille supplies the structural map the description withholds. Two parallel, interwoven stories run in alternate chapters: the survival of the plane crash at age eleven, and the year that led up to it. That alternation is why the book works and also why it can frustrate, since each thread keeps interrupting the other at its most urgent moment. The same response came to the book through a magazine ranking of great modern adventure and survival tales, and notes that the rest of that list was either already read or of no interest at all.
Self-narration changes the arithmetic of trust. The description quotes a line from inside the book, Dad and I were a team, and he was Superman, and on this recording that sentence is spoken by the son who wrote it about a father the crash killed. Nobody is being asked to imagine the altitude. Whether Ollestad reads well is a separate question, one the record does not answer and a sample settles in a minute, but the casting decision here is not a neutral one and should not be treated as one.
What Makes Crazy for the Storm Worth Hearing
Everything turns on the father, and every response registers it. Tom Weikert's four-star reading is the sharpest: a young boy caught in the awkward stretch when he wants to reach for his mother's apron strings and knows instinctively that growth lies in his father's outstretched hand. The copy is blunter, calling the man intense and charismatic and saying the boy both idolized and resented him. From the age of three he was pulled into surfing and competitive downhill skiing while other children rode bikes and went to birthday parties. Boy Wonder is what the father called him, and the description argues that the training is what kept him alive.
Prose is the other selling point, and the column backs the claim. Weikert describes idyllic imagery combined with spare, deeply passionate writing capturing an eleven-year-old's recollection of the most pivotal year of his life. The publisher calls it crisp and Hemingwayesque, which is a large thing to put on a jacket, and Weikert's independent description of spare passion is the nearest thing to corroboration available. The setting pulls weight too: the spontaneous, uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, a world that now reads as impossibly loose, running underneath a story everybody knows is heading for a mountain.
Reach is worth noting on a book this particular. The five responses come from four countries, two from the United States and one each from Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. ANGELA GOODWIN, writing from Australia, calls it a surprising page turner and says to pass it on to young men. A. Arlotti's response from Canada carries no title at all, only five stars and one sentence reporting a great read, thoroughly enjoyed.
Vamanos is the father's one Spanish word in the dialogue that opens the description, and it echoes oddly in the column: Richard A. Leveille titled a five-star response Loco por la tempestad, carrying the book's own name into another language on an English listing that explains neither choice. Both point the same direction. Mexico sits inside this memoir's landscape rather than at the end of a trip, next to Malibu and the late 1970s and a father who treated a coastline and a ski slope as the same curriculum.
Things to Know Before Starting Crazy for the Storm
Water Sports is the tag on this record, and it comes close to a category error. Surfing is genuinely half the childhood on offer, but the other half is competitive downhill skiing, and the event the whole book is built around is a chartered Cessna striking the San Gabriel Mountains at 8,200 feet in a blizzard. Nobody browsing a water sports shelf is looking for that. The sports-outdoors filing above it is fair enough. The tag beneath will send the wrong listener here and hide the book from the right one.
Mrs E K Bryant, writing from the United Kingdom, files the most practical objection: the surfing jargon was a bit too much at times, though it did link to challenge, endurance and risk, which that response takes as the book's real subject. In audio the complaint carries extra weight, because a listener cannot glance back at an unfamiliar term or skim past it. Anyone without the vocabulary should expect passages that move by without stopping to explain themselves.
One more thing the marketing makes no attempt to hide, and it should be said plainly: the crash, the deaths and the descent are all printed in the marketing copy. That is defensible for a memoir whose subject was public, but it means the book is not built on suspense about whether the boy gets down the mountain. What stands in for suspense is the long look at the year before, which is exactly where Weikert locates the most pivotal material. Listeners who need an outcome withheld should know that going in.
Who Norman Ollestad Is Writing For
Adventure and survival listeners are the primary audience, and one reviewer arrived by precisely that route, a published ranking of the best modern survival narratives. Parents of teenagers make a second: ANGELA GOODWIN's instruction to pass it on to young men is the kind of recommendation that carries weight. Anyone drawn to father-and-son books, particularly the difficult sort where love and pressure cannot be separated, will find the whole argument staged instead of summarized.
Leave it if you want a clean survival narrative, since half the running time is a Malibu childhood; if surf vocabulary without a glossary irritates you; or if a father-and-son story that never fully resolves its ambivalence sounds like a hard seven hours. What survives is the voice, and the strangeness of hearing a man narrate his own worst day at the age of eleven with no actor standing between the memory and the microphone.
- Narrator: Norman Ollestad reads the memoir personally, so the account of the 1979 crash comes from the boy who walked down off the mountain.
- Subjects: A father's relentless training, surf and ski culture in the late 1970s, a chartered plane down at 8,200 feet, survival at eleven.
- Tone: Sunlit and freezing by turns, tender underneath the pressure.
- Bottom line: A father-and-son book wearing a survival story's jacket, and better for it.
Good to Know
Does Norman Ollestad narrate his own audiobook?
Yes. The author field and the narrator field carry the same name, so the memoir of the 1979 crash is read by the person who survived it at eleven. That includes the line the publisher quotes about his father being Superman. No professional performer stands between the memory and the recording.
Is Crazy for the Storm mostly about the plane crash?
No, and one reviewer maps it clearly. Two interwoven stories alternate by chapter: the survival of the crash and its descent, and the year of surfing and ski training that preceded it. Another response calls that preceding year the most pivotal material in the book, which suggests the balance tilts toward childhood.
How much surfing knowledge does this audiobook assume?
More than one listener wanted. A four-star response from the United Kingdom found the surfing jargon a bit too much at times, while granting that it tied into challenge, endurance and risk. Audio makes that harder, since nothing can be reread. Expect unfamiliar terms to pass without a pause for explanation.
Would a teenager get on with this?
One reviewer thinks so emphatically, urging that it be passed on to young men. The subject matter includes a fatal crash, a father's death and a child descending a mountain alone, plus the loose adult world of late 1970s Malibu. No content rating appears on the listing to narrow that further.
