Crazy for the Storm
by Norman Ollestad
Narrated by Norman Ollestad
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
There's something quietly devastating about hearing a man describe nearly dying at age eleven — in his own voice, decades later.
- Great if you want: survival memoir with a complicated, emotional father-son relationship
- Listening experience: tense and intimate, with past and present woven tightly together
- Narration: Ollestad narrating his own story adds raw, unguarded weight
- Skip if: you find the non-linear structure more frustrating than rewarding
About This Audiobook
On a February morning in 1979, eleven-year-old Norman Ollestad survived a plane crash into the San Bernardino Mountains that killed his father, the pilot, and a family friend. What followed was a solo descent of nearly 9,000 feet through snow, ice, and bitter cold. Ollestad's memoir alternates between that descent, narrated in real time, and the story of his unconventional childhood with a father who pushed him relentlessly toward physical mastery on skis and in the ocean. The result is a portrait of how extreme experience shapes identity, and of the complicated love that can exist between a demanding father and the son who survives him.
Ollestad reads his own memoir, which gives the survival sequences an immediacy that a hired voice could not replicate. His narration carries the muscle memory of someone who lived through what he describes, and the emotional current running beneath the cold technical details of the descent is genuinely affecting. At under eight hours, Crazy for the Storm is compact and propulsive, and Ollestad's voice makes the father-son relationship feel absolutely real.