Crazy for "Crazy For The Storm"

You're going to be seeing a lot of Norm Ollestad this summer--him and his new memoir, Crazy For The Storm, which Ecco Press timed perfectly to come out just before Father's Day. Not only will the author be making the TV rounds, not only does he have an excerpt in Men's Journal, but he's been anointed by Starbucks, which will be selling it in something like 1,500 locations.

The story in brief: In February 1979, 12-year-old Ollestad was in a small plane that crashed into a mountain outside LA, in a blizzard. His father and the pilot were instantly killed; his father's girlfriend would not live long. Young Ollestad, the only survivor, had to get down the steep, icy mountain alone.

The survival part is only half the story; the real hero is Ollestad's dad, a onetime child actor and later FBI whistleblower who "retired" to Topanga Beach in the 1960s, which was everything you might imagine it to have been. Papa Ollestad believed in the "sink or swim" method of child rearing, dragging little Norman on one insanely dangerous adventure after another: big-wave surfing, off-piste skiing in deep powder, a roadtrip down to Mexico that reads like something from "Easy Rider." (Although luckily, the policeman's bullet bounced off Adventure Dad's guitar.)

If he tried to pull this stuff now (as I write in my Washington Post review), he would certainly be "pilloried by the Alpha Mommy Brigade and lose hope of ever visiting his beloved only son." But his intense parenting style (shall we say) also helped young Norman outlive him on that mountain, barely an hour from Beverly Hills.

Coming soon: the movie. Gnash teeth, envious writers; everyone else, go read it.