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WHAT MAKES OLGA RUN?

THE MYSTERY OF THE 90-SOMETHING TRACK STAR AND WHAT SHE CAN TEACH US ABOUT LIVING LONGER, HAPPIER LIVES

Eye-opening and insightful.

A Canadian freelance journalist probes the fascinating mystery behind a nonagenarian female’s stunning success as a competitive athlete.

When Olga Kotelko first took up track at age 77, it was simply for fun. But by the time she reached her 90s, the former schoolteacher had become the holder of more than 20 world records, and she was the fastest nonagenarian female in the world. In a book that is part biography and part exploration of the latest research in exercise physiology, gerontology and neuropsychology, Grierson (U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?, 2007) grapples with the question of why a little old lady barely 5 feet tall breaks records rather than bones. Science offers answers that are as tantalizing as they are incomplete. For most people, healthy aging boils down to three-quarters good lifestyle and one-quarter good genes. Grierson suggests that Olga’s habits—which include an “an abiding faith in water, reflexology,” intense workouts that target every moving part in her body and personal traits such as extroversion, friendliness and resilience—no doubt help to account for her impressive good health. Her family history, however, does not reveal exceptional longevity nor does it explain where Olga derived her almost freakish physical capabilities. Grierson proposes that the mystery surrounding Olga’s achievements has less to do with her lifestyle and genetic inheritance and more to do with how her particular body has somehow managed to develop mechanisms, which scientists have yet to understand, that have slowed the aging process. Olga’s body may be unique in its age-defying abilities, but her determination to push the limits of her own physicality is what is most inspiring of all, especially to baby boomers like the author. For Grierson, Olga is living proof that “[n]ot only is midlife not too late [to start exercising]…in some ways, it’s the best time to go for it.”

Eye-opening and insightful.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9720-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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