That was literally true. The elder Norman Ollestad  —an FBI agent who went on to work for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an Assistant U.S. Attorney — lived with his wife and young son on the beach near Los Angeles. He liked sport that was competitive, demanding, risky, so he’d wake the boy early for hockey practice, skiing and surfing. And once they were out on the slopes or the ocean, he’d revel in the untamed freedom he felt, the freedom he wanted his son to feel.

“Fighting through things to get to the good stuff,” he’d say.

And on the flip side, “giving up and missing out on fantastic moments.”

But that’s not surprising. In the California beach community that was home to the Ollestads in the 1970s, everyone in this boy’s life seemed to want it all. “A French guy named Jacques” came to visit just as Norman senior was recovering from knee surgery, so Norman’s mother showed him the sights. Soon those sights included her. Her husband moved out, quickly to be replaced by Nick, an angry, drunken thug who liked to humiliate the small.

The story of Norman’s childhood — enduring his mother’s boyfriend, adventures with his father, hanging out with the cool kids at the beach — is wonderfully remembered and observed. It is sad and touching: Norman chose to affirm his father’s values even when Nick demanded submission. And those values included his father’s love of dangerous sport:

So there is the boy, at an altitude of 8,200 feet with the temperature dropping and snow falling. Helicopters can’t see him. Rescuers have no idea where he is. The only way Norman will survive is if he saves himself.
Of course he does — and, of course, he reaffirms the hard lessons his father taught him.

You would think that this self-rescue is exciting. It almost is. But Ollestad’s step-by-step account of his trek down the mountain is marred by overly technical writing. Ditto the passages about skiing. And the accounts of wave riding take me further into surfing than I really want to go.

If you don’t surf, ski or escape down mountains, you too may find these passages a bit of a bore. But even if you love those passages, I think you’ll agree that they’re not the strength of the book — the memoir of a beach childhood is.

A childhood story, no matter how brilliant, is rarely a publishing event. A kid saving his life is. So “Crazy for the Storm” is being marketed as “a memoir of survival”. And, as parents, we are invited to ask ourselves: Is my kid too soft? If I were tougher, would my kid have a better chance of survival in an increasingly combative world?

These are good questions. I think the answers can be better found in the home and on the beach than on the ocean or the ski slopes. But I understand the publishing strategy. It will surely work. I can’t help but think, though, that had I been his editor, Norman Ollestad’s riveting 278 page book would be an impossible-to-put-down 250 pages — and, I like to think, a bestseller would have had a shot at "classic".

— by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com