About the Book:

From the age of three, Norman Ollestad was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing by the intense, charismatic father he both idolized and resented. While his friends were riding bikes, playing ball, and going to birthday parties, young Norman was whisked away in pursuit of wild and demanding adventures. Yet it were these exhilarating tests of skill that prepared “Boy Wonder,” as his father called him, to become a fearless champion–and ultimately saved his life.

Flying to a ski championship ceremony in February 1979, the chartered Cessna carrying Norman, his father, his father’s girlfriend, and the pilot crashed into the San Gabriel Mountains and was suspended at 8,200 feet, engulfed in a blizzard. “Dad and I were a team, and he was Superman,” Ollestad writes. But now Norman’s father was dead, and the devastated eleven-year-old had to descend the treacherous, icy mountain alone.

Set amid the spontaneous, uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, this riveting memoir, written in crisp Hemingwayesque prose, recalls Ollestad’s childhood and the magnetic man whose determination and love infuriated and inspired him–and also taught him to overcome the indomitable. As it illuminates the complicated bond between an extraordinary father and his son, Ollestad’s powerful and unforgettable true story offers remarkable insight for us all.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is a book that I was a little disappointed in.  Mainly because it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it to be.  All of the play up for the book indicated that this would be a survival story — and maybe it was in more ways than one.  However, the actual survival of the plane crash story is only about a quarter of the book, and everything else is the relationship between the author and either his father, or his mother’s boyfriend.  Some of which is presented in the crudest, and most vulgar of forms.

I was very interested in the survival story itself, especially since that is what I was expecting to read when I first opened the book.  Unfortunately, the survival story is very straight forward, with very little detail, almost as if the author was trying to get it out of the way, so that he could get back to what the intent of his real story was about.  I just came away feeling like the survival story portion of this book was very rushed, and almost overlooked, and that the author didn’t really want to tell that story at all.  In fact, I almost felt like he was using the subject of the plane crash/survival story as a means of catching attention, so that people would reading it, and nothing more.

The story about his relationship with his father, and his mother’s boyfriend — particularly the struggle that existed because of the abuse that went on at the hands of the boyfriend was another part of the story, which could have been quite interesting.  And the interplay of the theme of survival could have made quite a good story, since it is apparent that there is a survival story from his childhood, and not just from the plane crash.  Unfortunately I found the writing so dramatically different between the portions about his childhood, and the portions that dealt with the plane crash that I was a little surprised that this book was entirely written by one person.  It was almost as if Mr. Ollestad was trying to use vulgarity, and the shock effect to keep the reader’s attention when he wasn’t talking about the actual plane crash, which is what the book was supposedly going to be about.

Overall, I found the book to be more burdensome, and frustrating, than a particularly interesting read.  If I had known going in that it wasn’t the story that I was expecting to find, I would probably have passed on this one.  That is not to say that there wasn’t some valuable information that could be obtained from the story, especially about growing up in a difficult family setting.  But the story seemed to fall flat in both portions, and in the end I felt extremely let down.

Tags: Family, Grief, Loss, Memory, Suffering, Survivor

Category: Biography/Autobiography, History, Non-Fiction