What Makes Olga Run?

Author: Bruce Grierson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805097201
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
A fascinating look at the way we age today and the extent to which we can shape the process In What Makes Olga Run? Bruce Grierson explores what the wild success of a ninety-four-year-old track star can tell us about how our bodies and minds age. Olga Kotelko is not your average ninety-four-year-old. She not only looks and acts like a much younger woman, she holds over twenty-three world records in track and field, seventeen in her current ninety to ninety-five category. Convinced that this remarkable woman could help unlock many of the mysteries of aging, Grierson set out to uncover what it is that's driving Olga. He considers every piece of the puzzle, from her diet and sleep habits to how she scores on various personality traits, from what she does in her spare time to her family history. Olga participates in tests administered by some of the world's leading scientists and offers her DNA to groundbreaking research trials. What emerges is not only a tremendously uplifting personal story but a look at the extent to which our health and longevity are determined by the DNA we inherit at birth, and the extent to which we can shape that inheritance. It examines the sum of our genes, opportunities, and choices, and the factors that forge the course of any life, especially during our golden years.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Author: Erika L. Sánchez
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1524700509
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
National Book Award Finalist! Instant New York Times Bestseller! The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meets Jane the Virgin in this poignant but often laugh-out-loud funny contemporary YA about losing a sister and finding yourself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican-American home. Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it’s not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister’s story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal? “Alive and crackling—a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner. ”—The New York Times “Unique and fresh.” —Entertainment Weekly “A standout.” —NPR

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525541357
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." —Annie Proulx In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

U-Turn

Author: Bruce Grierson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1582345872
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
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.

The Joy of Cancer

Author: Olga Munari Assaly
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 9781475951967
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
In April of 2006, Olga Munari was at the end of her rope. Unhappy with her life and her marriage, Olga confessed to her personal trainer that she wished something bad would happen to her as a means to create change in her life and her relationship. The following Monday, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Kim Mecca narrates the moving story of how Olga bravely faced a life-threatening diagnosis and used it as an opportunity to create a sacred bond with her children, adopt a positive attitude, and give back to others. As Olga began her journey through surgery and subsequent treatment, she soon discovered that her healing was not only physical, but also emotional. She learned to create joy from her immense challenges. As Mecca details Olgas dedication to fundraising, her decision to not change her life because she had cancer, and her devotion to her family, she provides an unforgettable glimpse into all the ways Olga walked through the darkness of her disease and into the light of healing. The Joy of Cancer tells the inspiring story of how one woman used her breast cancer diagnosis to slowly transform, break free of her cocoon, and become the beautiful butterfly she was always meant to be.

Olga

Author: Bernhard Schlink
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063112949
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
“Two world wars and the passage of more than a century do not overshadow [Bernhard Schlink’s] story of lovers who never fully belong to each other, just as they never fully belonged to the world.”—Booklist “A brilliant novel about history and the nature of memory.”—Evening Standard A sweeping novel of love and passion from author of the international bestseller The Reader about a woman out of step with her time, whose life is witness to some of the most tumultuous events of modern age. Abandoned by her parents, young Olga is raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village in the early years of the twentieth century. Smart and precocious, endearing but uncompromising, she fights against ingrained chauvinism to find her place in a world run by lesser men. When Olga falls in love with her neighbor, Herbert, the son of a local aristocrat, her life is irremediably changed. While Herbert indulges his thirst for exploration and adventure, Olga is limited by her gender and circumstance. Her love for Herbert goes against all odds and encounters many obstacles, but even when they are separated, it endures Unfolding across decades—from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century—and across continents—from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west—Olga is an epic romance, and a wrenching tale of a woman’s devotion to a restless man in an age of constant change. Though Olga exists in the shadows of others, she pursues life to the fullest and her magnetic presence shines—revealing a woman complex, fascinating, and unforgettable. Told in three distinct parts, brilliantly shifting from different points of view and narrative formats, Bernhard Schlink’s magnificent novel is a rich, full portrait of a singular woman and her world. Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins

Forty Rooms

Author: Olga Grushin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101983094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel. Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply. “Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her. Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.

Olga

Author: Olga Kotelko
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1460229444
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Of Ukrainian descent, Olga was born in a small Saskatchewan town on March 2, 1919. She became a teacher in 1941 and, over the next 34 years, she taught her students the importance of developing good health and fitness habits to ensure they maintain a balanced life ... At 77, she decided to try track and field. Her dedication to the sport helped her win gold ... As of 2014, Olga has broken 26 world records in track and field and earned over 700 medals. -- [p.4] of cover.

The Line

Author: Olga Grushin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101186216
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Grushin's stunning debut drew praise that placed her in the top rank of young literary voices. Now she returns with that rarity: a second novel even more dazzling than her first. The line: the universal symbol of scarcity and bureaucracy that exists wherever petty officials are let loose to abuse their powers. The line begins to form on the whispered rumor that a famous exiled composer is returning to Moscow to conduct his last symphony. Tickets will be limited. Nameless faces join the line, jostling for preferred position. But as time passes and the seasons change and the ticket kiosk remains shuttered, these anonymous souls take on individual shape. Unlikely friendships are forged, long-buried memories spring to life, and a year-long wait is rewarded with unexpected acts of kindness that ease the bleakness of harshly lived lives. A disparate gaggle of strangers evolves into a community of friends united in their desire to experience music they have never been allowed to hear. The Line is a transformative novel that speaks to the endurance of the human spirit even as it explores the ways in which we love-and what we do for love.

The Hearing Trumpet

Author: Leonora Carrington
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374641
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”