About this item
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Gutsy Girl, a funny, inspiring, deeply researched exploration into the science and psychology of the outdoors and our place in it as we age. Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren't women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age? Tough Broad is her quest to understand not just how to live a dynamic life in a changing body, but why we must. She dives deep into the current research on aging, and highlights the results with the stories of women like ninety-three-year-old hiker Dot Fisher-Smith, eighty-year-old scuba diver Louise Wholey, fifty-two-year-old BASE jumper Shawn Brokemond, sixty-four-year-old birdwatcher Virginia Rose, and the many septuagenarian Wave Chasers who boogie board together in the San Diego surf.
About the Author
I grew up in New England, with an identical twin, a younger brother, and a menagerie of animals. I did some goofy things as an adolescent: I learned all the constellations in the Western Hemisphere; I tried to set the Guinness World Record for crawling; I built a boat out of milk cartons, then convinced my twin and two friends to join me on the river, then waded to shore with them when it broke up in the first rapid. These adventures and more are part of my latest book, The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure, written especially for 7-12 year-old girls. I graduated from Stanford University, where I studied Communications. At the time I had a vague idea that perhaps I would become a documentary filmmaker. Instead, in 1989, I became a San Francisco firefighter.I wrote about my thirteen and a half year career in Fighting Fire, an updated version of which came out in 2011. I'd tell you about those years, but really, you should just read the book. I will only say that being in a fire made me happy, and doing emergency medical work intrigued me. All of it made me a better person.The most remote place I've been is Siberia, where I saw a Unidentified Flying Object that may or may not have been the Soviet military. The highest place I've been was on a mountain bike in the Bolivian Alps back when mountain bikes were scarce and 15,000 feet didn't hurt as much as it would now. The most isolated I've ever felt was in a blizzard on the mountain of Denali, where we had to stay in the tent and pee into a Gatorade bottle.My novel East Wind, Rain came out in 2006. It is based closely on the little known but true story some call "the battle of Niihau," that begins when a Japanese pilot who has just attacked Pearl Harbor is forced to crash land on an isolated Hawaiian island. The inhabitants there have no communication with the outside world, and are puzzled by his sudden, dramatic arrival. The book follows the next seven days, as the seemingly mysterious event divides the villagers and disrupts a once peaceful paradise. "When it's over, you don't want to leave," said the New York Times. In 2013 my third book, Lost Cat, A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, was published. It's about my obsessive to search to figure out where my cat journeyed when I was not around and entailed GPS tracking, video, psychics and animal communicators. Despite the title, it's really about how lost humans can become, and the animals that help them regain their bearings. Lost Cat was named a Best Book by Jezebel and by the influential website Brainpickings. For years I was mistaken for my identical twin, Alexandra Paul. That would ordinarily be unremarkable, except that Alexandra is an actress with a long and storied career, and her face (and thus mine) is recognized all over the world. The ensuing confusion, absurdity, and hilarity is captured in the essay Almost Her:The Strange Dilemma of Being N
