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marmoo's review
2.0
There’s certainly a story to be told in this saga of a mismanaged amusement park, but it’s evidently not a story that someone so enmeshed and implicated as the owner’s son can do any sort of justice to. Instead, his lack of perspective makes for cringe after cringe, as serious OSHA violations are reduced to slapstick comedy and criminal negligence to hijinks.
As the narrator, Andy Mulvihill comes off as a delusional rich kid play acting as a particular sort of underdog who wants to make sure you know he’s better than those other, lesser underdogs. Amid out-of-touch complaints about what other teenagers had that he didn’t—allowances and cushy jobs in the fast food industry(???), mostly—he details his nepotistic adventures of too much responsibility and not enough sense.
In his painstaking recollection of every Animal House-aping bender and skin-gouging park attraction, he seems to want you to gasp at the audacious danger while also reveling in the thrill of it. It’s precarious balance from the first that quickly becomes untenable as the bodies start piling up.
The whiplash in this book isn’t just literal. You can’t, it turns out, effortlessly bounce between first snickering at two “heavyset” women having their swim suit tops pulled off in a comedically rendered near-drowning to then half-heartedly justifying why the park really couldn’t be blamed for those other patrons who really did drown. And, if the, again, multiple fatalities are ruining the rollicking vibe, it was a puerile, mean-spirited vibe to begin with.
Though Mulvihill savors the tedious minutia of his personal life—rattling off the names of all his various drinking buddies and teenage sweethearts who barely figure into the narrative—he reduces the guests at the park to one amorphous teeming mass of adrenaline and bad decision-making. Instead of treating those tens of thousands of daily patrons as, well, tens of thousands of different people with different motivations and access to information, they are reduced to one shared impulse for self-destruction, with the implication that, if anyone was injured, weren’t they pretty much asking for it?
“My father offered risk. People took him up on it. Some had regrets,” he hand waves, before detailing the deliberate steps his father took to underreport injuries and flout the safety laws that might have allowed for more-informed risk taking.
That victim blaming impulse might be shocking if it weren’t so nakedly self-interested. This is a man who clearly can’t bear to let the pall of death and dismemberment darken his cherished memories of dirtbag teenage antics.
That allergy to self-awareness is the book’s most persistent feature. “In my father’s world, being a relative or near-relative held no guarantee of preferential treatment,” he insists, while describing his brother’s fiancee’s recent promotion to head of ride operations and general services, which came after his own series of outsize responsibilities as a high school and college student. “It was usually the opposite.” Brazen insurance fraud becomes a “divisive insurance strategy;” skirting legal restrictions becomes “waving off the state’s aggression like a martial-arts master deftly sidestepping a mugger.” He can’t or won’t recognize that readers may not all be rooting for this death trap run by his glorified fraudster of a father to stay open.
Setting aside the dubious justifications of two decades of endangering the public, this book has the quality of being told by that one parent partying at the college tailgate, buying the attention of his underage fellow tailgaters with smuggled alcohol and questionable recollections of his glory days. Mulvihill has a fabulist’s flair for situational irony that strains even the most generous credulity, with pithy fragment after fragment of telling dialogue immediately disproven with a sitcom-quick cut for comedic effect.
In the end, this tiresome personal memoir masquerading as micro-history is anything but the “wild ride” it promises in the sub-title; instead, it is an off-putting chronicle of unchecked greed, political cronyism, and criminal negligence.
As the narrator, Andy Mulvihill comes off as a delusional rich kid play acting as a particular sort of underdog who wants to make sure you know he’s better than those other, lesser underdogs. Amid out-of-touch complaints about what other teenagers had that he didn’t—allowances and cushy jobs in the fast food industry(???), mostly—he details his nepotistic adventures of too much responsibility and not enough sense.
In his painstaking recollection of every Animal House-aping bender and skin-gouging park attraction, he seems to want you to gasp at the audacious danger while also reveling in the thrill of it. It’s precarious balance from the first that quickly becomes untenable as the bodies start piling up.
The whiplash in this book isn’t just literal. You can’t, it turns out, effortlessly bounce between first snickering at two “heavyset” women having their swim suit tops pulled off in a comedically rendered near-drowning to then half-heartedly justifying why the park really couldn’t be blamed for those other patrons who really did drown. And, if the, again, multiple fatalities are ruining the rollicking vibe, it was a puerile, mean-spirited vibe to begin with.
Though Mulvihill savors the tedious minutia of his personal life—rattling off the names of all his various drinking buddies and teenage sweethearts who barely figure into the narrative—he reduces the guests at the park to one amorphous teeming mass of adrenaline and bad decision-making. Instead of treating those tens of thousands of daily patrons as, well, tens of thousands of different people with different motivations and access to information, they are reduced to one shared impulse for self-destruction, with the implication that, if anyone was injured, weren’t they pretty much asking for it?
“My father offered risk. People took him up on it. Some had regrets,” he hand waves, before detailing the deliberate steps his father took to underreport injuries and flout the safety laws that might have allowed for more-informed risk taking.
That victim blaming impulse might be shocking if it weren’t so nakedly self-interested. This is a man who clearly can’t bear to let the pall of death and dismemberment darken his cherished memories of dirtbag teenage antics.
That allergy to self-awareness is the book’s most persistent feature. “In my father’s world, being a relative or near-relative held no guarantee of preferential treatment,” he insists, while describing his brother’s fiancee’s recent promotion to head of ride operations and general services, which came after his own series of outsize responsibilities as a high school and college student. “It was usually the opposite.” Brazen insurance fraud becomes a “divisive insurance strategy;” skirting legal restrictions becomes “waving off the state’s aggression like a martial-arts master deftly sidestepping a mugger.” He can’t or won’t recognize that readers may not all be rooting for this death trap run by his glorified fraudster of a father to stay open.
Setting aside the dubious justifications of two decades of endangering the public, this book has the quality of being told by that one parent partying at the college tailgate, buying the attention of his underage fellow tailgaters with smuggled alcohol and questionable recollections of his glory days. Mulvihill has a fabulist’s flair for situational irony that strains even the most generous credulity, with pithy fragment after fragment of telling dialogue immediately disproven with a sitcom-quick cut for comedic effect.
In the end, this tiresome personal memoir masquerading as micro-history is anything but the “wild ride” it promises in the sub-title; instead, it is an off-putting chronicle of unchecked greed, political cronyism, and criminal negligence.
jilly1130's review
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
Nostalgia for 80 and 90's
The good.and bad of the park
The good.and bad of the park
writeonly's review against another edition
was interested in learning about action park from the perspective of one of the park creator’s kids but it got difficult to read once the author got on his hands and knees started sucking off Ronald Reagan tip to balls
upon learning that a particular water slide ride caused women’s bikini tops to get removed due to the force he writes “I wondered how Ronald Reagan would feel about this”. what the fuck?
maybe it’s sarcastic and i’m too dumb to realize this but idk. shit’s fucking weird
upon learning that a particular water slide ride caused women’s bikini tops to get removed due to the force he writes “I wondered how Ronald Reagan would feel about this”. what the fuck?
maybe it’s sarcastic and i’m too dumb to realize this but idk. shit’s fucking weird
chambersaurusrx's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
cjfich's review
4.0
Great read. When we lived there from 1995-97, our kids so wanted that park to open. There were always rumors. And, of course, they heard from their local friends how much fun they had had at the park. The magician behind it all, Andy Mulvihill's father, Gene, is an amazing -- if not eccentric man. This is a look at the bygone days of over-regulation (not that regulation is good) and over-litigation.
toulousifer's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
5.0
ashction's review
4.0
a thorough and detailed history from Gene Mulvihill's son, this is sure to shock and horrify as much as it thrills you. much better than the HBO documentary!