Crazy for the Storm

Crazy for the Storm
A Memoir of Survival
Normal Ollestad
Ecco Books, an Imprint of Harper Collings Books
ISBN: 978-0-06-176672-5
272 pages
Rating: Mighty Toasty

This is a true story of Norman Ollestad's being the sole survivor of a plane crash which took his father's life atop a snow covered mountain range. His prose is engaging, and his haunting begining in his dedication prepares the reader for a story well-told and memorable, "An insatiable spirit, he (my father) was crazy for the storm. And it saved my life. This book is for my father and for my son."

Initially I was drawn to the story by the very idea of an 11 year old boy surmonting difficult odds, and had thought, after reading, I would pass it on to my own 10 year old son. However, the story, for my taste, has too many distracting foul words and instances of sex or sex-related dialogue for a child, so I didn't.

The author uses flashbacks to reveal his tender, agonizing love-hate for his father, who forces his son to learn incredible sports like surfing, skiing and drags him to Mexico on exciting trips across the border with encounters with suspicious characters and beautiful young women. On the surface, some may say, "Awesome! What a lucky guy!". But like all of us, we don't appreciate the gifts of our parents until we are older, and like any pre-teen, he pouts and is petulant about missing birthday parties and doing "normal' things with other teenagers.

There is a substory that is difficult for me to retell but I sense it among the words. The ancient passing on of wisdom from parent to child, the soulfully gratifying passage knowledge of father to son. We share our heritage with our children in the hopes of leaving a part of ourselves behind. We teach our children in the hope they will remember.

Norman, astride his surfboard near the end of the story, remembers his father, feels his emptiness for losing his father, finds the bridging peace which had eluded him for a long time.

A Long Way Gone

A Long Way Gone
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2007
ISBN 13:978-0-374-10523-5
229 pages
Rating: Blue Hot

This is an elegant, eloquent true journey of a youth-soldier in war torn Sierra Leone, Africa. Beah's evocative prose captures the confused, hesitant yet inevitable passage of innocence into hard-won early adulthood, but an adulthood based on thin realities and imbalanced truth. The story is almost other-worldly as you travel with Beah from his pre-teen love of rap music to his ghostly experiences of systematic murder where he robotically participates in a war against man, as he mutually rages within himself. I couldn't help but think: Does Naughty By Nature (rap music group) know how their music saved him, literally and figuratively, from war's insanity? The conclusion will leave you breathless as Beah emerges from the maelstrom, to live a life crystalline with truth and blood, hope and death. He is haunted by his own ghost of the future-past. Larger questions of the origination of war, children of war, loss of innocence, and our own universal connections with each other will provoke you long after you close the book.