Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

Ye gods do I need a break! What with wildfire and plague, trump and locusts, it's all I can do to maintain a semblance of sanity here in my isolated bubble of self-quarantine. A book. I needed a book to take me away to simpler times; to lull me into a state of mindless anarchy where the rules of common sense need not apply and the consequences be damned. I don't remember where I read about this one, but the topic seemed right up there with the annotated chronicles of competitive eating and the Ghislaine Maxwell depositions in terms of wacky summer entertainment, so I snagged myself a copy and had at it.Dayam, this is a funny book. A dutiful son's wry, sly, even (dare I say it,) sentimental portrait of a Man With a Dream who wasn't about to let anything as mundane as the county planning commission or the Consumer Safety Act get in the way of bringing it to fruition. Only six pages in, I'd already doubled over and fallen off the porch swing onto the deck where I lay gasping for breath in between guffaws.Not sure if the authors were trying to replicate the (Class) Action Park experience with this wonder of a tome, but I can definitely see how reading it without a helmet and knee pads at the ready might be injurious to one's health and personal safety. Best enjoyed with an icy pitcher of your favorite adult beverage and that devil-may-care bravada/owe seemingly lost somewhere around the late 1980s.The perfect summer read, m'dudes! You've written an "Animal House" for the new millennium-- hopefully coming soon to a theater or drive-in near me?Oh, wait. . . .

I miss action park. The planets all lined up once in the history of mankind for the this icon of the 1980’s to happen. This book brought me back and made me laugh out loud multiple times. For every photo I call my wife and kids over like an actor proud of his past and show them- “I did this one! I survived that one- twice!” I bough the book a bit skeptical about the quality, but now that I’m nearly done, I can say it is well written, very funny, and highly nostalgic. I had kept up with the action park lore over the years online and thought I knew every story there was to tell- who knew those tales were the tip of the iceberg. This book brought back so many new memories. The bees, the garbage juice, the gang fights, the lifeguards uniforms. The Tanks with the tennis balls! The boats that splashed u with toxic fuel! Epic road rash from the alpine slide! On a more serious side, I am impressed that the author (the owners son) did not shy away from the subject of the deaths, and noticeably changed the tone of the book to discuss them.All in all, one of the best books I’ve read in a while. If u are a child of the 80’s, had poofy hair and owned a members only jacket, and lived in the northeast with experience in “traction park”, u will read this book in one sitting.

This book is a fun read and the stories the author tells are truly entertaining. I’d heard rumors about some of the tales presented here but seeing them all in one place is a great way to remember a part of my childhood that is thankfully long gone. Having grown up in northern NJ in the 70s and 80s, a stone’s throw from Vernon, I recall visiting Action Park and having a great time on the water rides, the Alpine Slide, and in the maze. (I wasn’t old enough for the mini-race cars and felt the tennis ball shooting tanks were absurd.)But while I always enjoyed my time there, I and all my friends knew that the park (which we endearingly referred to as “Accident Park”) was as dangerous as it was fun. Six people died as a result of injuries sustained in the park. Many thousands were injured in less than fatal ways. While the author does not gloss over this fact, he also does not seem to really “get” this on a deep level. The story he weaves in a glowing “aww shucks” tone is of his seemingly ADHD entrepreneurial father, a man who built the park out of sheer will (and dubious business practices) as a place where customers could indulge their sense of adventure and danger, skirting the boundaries of safety to achieve a rush of adrenaline. But there is never any real acceptance of their responsibility to keep their patrons safe. Even in the book’s most somber moments (after some ticketholder drowns or is electrocuted) the most we get is a bit of reflection that is only on the surface. “Respect this,” the author’s father says to him after one such tragedy. But then they pivot to the next poorly designed, hastily erected deathtrap without a second thought. There is little sense that any of his family accept any responsibility for the deaths, and certainly not the more routine injuries. In their weirdly libertarian weltanschauung it seems all the responsibility rests on the victim. After all, they knew the rides were dangerous, didn’t they? Whose fault was it really if they went ahead and got themselves hurt? Didn’t the park provide lots of jobs for the locals? If the town of Vernon and state of New Jersey really disapproved, wouldn’t they have done everything they could to shut the park down (sooner)? Oh, and don’t worry about the fact that none of the rides were adequately designed or tested to ANY accepted engineering and safety standards, or that the park was “insured” by a shell company created by the owner. It all makes for a great story now. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Move along!All told, it’s amazing that more people weren’t killed at Action Park. It was a relic of another time that could only exist in the brief window when it did. Thankfully we can revisit it now, from a truly safe distance, with this book. Like I said, it’s a fun and entertaining read. But that’s only because everything looks better when viewed through the lens of nostalgia. There are at least six families who would see things quite differently.

If you were, as I was, a teen in the 1970's, Mulvihill's book islike a wormhole, that sucks you back to that era that I tendto think of as "when it all started to go wrong". It's like ActionPark was a biosphere of the dystopia at the core of the Americanpsyche. Self-destruction in all its mad glory. The writing issmooth and compelling, pulling you in and refusing to let youcome up for air, as Mulvihill plunges you into the lunacy andnever stops, piling it on, and it is hilarious, but it's the hilarityof disbelief, because you cannot believe this, and yet, you knowthat it's real because you knew people like this, maybe evenwere one, and Gene Mulvihill was the typical American businessman, living his dream. Move over, Stephen King,because THIS is horror.

This book had me hooked from the first picture on the inside, even before the text started! Each chapter holds a "holy crap!" episode and you'll think, "This is the craziest stuff I ever heard," but then there's MORE. I would've been too scared to go to Action Park if I had known about it back then, so this book let me live it vicariously. Awesome story!

It's so funny, it's hard to believe it really happened. It's brilliant, I couldn't put it down. Wish I could go back in time to New Jersey 1986 and experience this insanity for real.

Laugh out loud fun! If you want to escape this world right now I highly recommend a trip to Action Park. A brilliant memoir in a different time.

Such a hilarious book - written with clear affection for the subject. It’s clearly an account of a long-gone era and shows how much things have changed in one or two generations.

A good book to read.However, we can tell from the start that the very casual attitude about Health and Safety from the park owner will turn into some serious issues later on. Highly predictable outcome.I think the writer (the park owner's son) is quite casual about reporting accidents too, despite some quite serious and fatal. Doesn't seem to understand how serious the situations were, as per his father.