Bruce Grierson

This profile of the award-winning, record-holding 93-year-old track star aims to reveal some of the mysteries of the aging process by discussing her diet, sleep habits, personality traits and family history. 50,000 first printing.

The Mystery of the 90-Something Track Star and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives

What Makes Olga Run?

Part science book, part journey into the untapped potential of the human spirit, this is the remarkable story of a 94-year-old track and field champion (not retired). Olga Kotelko is most certainly a genetic outlier, one of those rare, blessed people whose bodies resist the degradations of age. More remarkably, she's not alone; there are men and women all over the world competing at ages at which most of us will be lucky even to be alive. But her secret, and theirs, isn't just the luck of the gene pool. It's in the stories of how they exploit their genetic good fortune where the lessons for the rest of us may be found. Author Bruce Grierson, whose much-read 2010 New York Times Magazine piece first brought attention to Olga's remarkable story, accompanies the nonagenarian Canadian to track meets to see her in action, and to research facilities around North America where he and medical researchers hope to learn the secrets of her thriving tissues and age-resistant DNA. And perhaps most importantly, she welcomes him and us into her world, where we learn that your life might benefit most of all from how you live it.

The Mystery of the 90-Something Track Star, and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives

In this impressively researched and incisive book, Bruce Grierson draws on over three hundred stories of so-called "U-turners," who have risked their livelihoods to answer a sudden wake-up call. We meet people who change political parties and careers, doctors who quit to become poets, men who become women, people who suddenly become revolutionaries for a cause they didn't care about the day before. In chapters that address everything from the neuroscience behind epiphanies to the possibility of "forcing" a U-turn, Grierson brilliantly describes and elucidates this powerful, mysterious phenomenon, and in doing so illuminates all of our continual struggles with life choices and identity.

What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?

U-Turn

Drawing on hundreds of case studies, a look at the psychology of major midlife U-turns examines the life-transforming phenomenon from a philosophical, literary, scientific, and psychological perspective to explain why it occurs.

Bruce Grierson

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