Gary Paulsen has lived an amazing life.  It is his experiences, both as a youth and later as an adult, that shaped the characters and plots of his Hatchet and other Brian Robeson books.  Most of Paulsen's childhood, he was left to his own devices by parents who were heavy drinkers.  He worked any job he could find from picking rocks out of fields for farmers, to picking crops, to setting bowling pins at the local bowling alley on Friday nights. Paulsen did this not only to escape his home life but to feed his family and his love for being a self sufficient survivalist.  As a youth, with his earnings from odd jobs, Paulsen learned how to craft his own bow and arrow and then use it to take down any number of small and large game.   Both in his younger years and later as an adult, Paulsen's adventures included angry moose, deer, swarms of insects, and even kicking a bear's behind- literally.  Paulsen worked as a wilderness emergency worker, raced the Iditarod, and traveled the world as a part of his service in the U.S. Army.  All of these rich experiences have worked to shape his  many written works but this book, GUTS, focuses on his wilderness survival background.  

It was amazing to hear the real life events that inspired Gary Paulsen to write Brian Robeson's survival story found in Hatchet, The River, Brian's Winter, and Brian's Return.  Gary Paulsen kept journals in his spare time of the adventures he had lived.  I would think this book, like Hatchet, would appeal to teen boys in particular but I found it fascinating.  As a side note, when I was working on this reading log entry, I had some men working in my house on a Radon system.  As we were talking about follow up procedures, one of the men noticed GUTS on my kitchen counter and stopped mid-sentence to pick it up and say, "Oh cool, I loved Hatchet! I didn't know about this book!"  One of the areas I really want to focus on as a librarian is reaching out to the male YA population in hopes of creating more life long readers in this demographic.  This book seemed like another way to hook the interest of many teen boys.