Jo A. Peterson (Children's Literature)
Not to be compared with his texts Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room, Paulsen expresses the theme of survival in this text by giving humorous accounts of how he and his friends managed to live through their extreme sports antics. Each chapter describes in detail an outrageous incident of the boys, while they either amuse themselves or show off to girls. Carl breaks the world speed record on skis, Orvis jumps over three burning barrels on his bicycle and wrestles a bear, and Emil jumps off the town's water tower using an old WWII parachute. Paulsen has an incident to describe each of his friends. His gift of narrating exactly how a thirteen-year-old boy would behave gives each chapter a hilarious realistic account of boyhood. Paulsen shows he is in touch with his own childhood and as a result, he writes uproariously, amusing tales that will appeal to boys and girls alike. 2003, Wendy Lamb Books, $12.95 and $14.99. Ages 10 to 15.

Elisabeth Greenberg (Children's Literature)
This collection of madcap adventure tales of extreme sports will capture every boy's heart. Who hasn't wanted to try tumbling down a waterfall in a barrel or biking up a ramp to jump over Dad's car? Gary Paulsen's vivid memories of what it was like to be thirteen, thrilling to adventure but way too shy to talk to girls, leap right off the page and into the imagination. Paulsen's own insatiable "scientific" curiousity--"What exactly would happen to Carl if he went over seventy-four miles an hour on a pair of army surplus skis?"--provides the link between all these outrageous tales about extreme sports. Concrete details like picking potatoes "for a whopping seven cents a bushel" and stripping "good old-fashioned one-speed fat-tired" Schwinns down to their tires and sprockets set the book solidly in the middle of the 1900s and teach the reader quite a bit about life in the '50s. The book is pitch perfect, beginning right with the dedication--"to all boys in their thirteenth year; the miracle is that we live through it." 2003, Wendy Lamb Books/Random House Children's Books, $12.95. Ages 10 up.

Susie Wilde (Children's Literature)
Humor comes to short novels in Paulsen's book, which is dedicated to "all boys in their thirteenth year; the miracle is that we live through it." In his prologue he remembers a conversation with his son after the boy has experimented with peeing on electric fences. When his son asks if he'll ever stop doing things like this, Paulsen shakes his head and answers, "It's the way we are." These are stories of the early days of extreme sports which he notes were different because "we were quite a bit dumber then" and "there wasn't any safety gear." With rollicking good humor we hear stories of boys who dare. There's Carl Peterson, determined to set a speed skiing record behind a fast-moving '39 Ford sedan. Armed with WWII gear from the army surplus store, he zooms through too much snow until at last he hits a ditch and his buddies find him with snow "packed into every opening and crevice of his clothes and his body." Shy Orvis Orvisen loses his senses impressing a girl and is determined to remain in a wrestling ring with an enormous bear! Paulsen's stories show that boys will always be boys because hormones will always be hormones. Thank goodness they can count on Paulsen for humor and reassurance about the prevalence of this condition! 2003, Random House, $12.95. Ages 10 up.

Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2002 (Vol. 70, No. 23))
Dedicated to all 13-year-old boys ("The miracle is that we live through it"), Paulsen's latest collection of possibly autobiographical anecdotes, his most hilarious yet, celebrates that innate impulse to try really stupid stunts, just to see what happens. What sort of bad ideas can a group of lads in a small Minnesota town come up with? "Angel" Peterson ties himself, on skis, to a fast car, earning his sobriquet after claiming to hear angels singing "Your Cheatin' Heart" when the attempt goes disastrously awry. Because some girls are watching, Orvis Orvisen goes toe to toe with a live sideshow bear; others try various primitive, ill-considered forms of hang-gliding, bicycle-jumping, and skateboarding, capped by a sidesplitting outtake from the author's Harris and Me (1993), featuring a wildly misguided attempt at bungee-jumping. Related with the author's customary matter-of-fact tone and keen comic timing, these episodes will not only keep young readers, of both sexes, in stitches, they're made to order for reading aloud. 2003, Wendy Lamb/Random, $12.95. Category: Biography. Ages 10 to 12. Starred Review. © 2002 Kirkus Reviews/VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Vicki Arkoff (Midwest Book Review, "Vicki's Bookshelf" column, March 2003)
Personal memoirs just don't get any more charming and funny than this. Award-winning author Gary Paulsen ("The Winter Room," "Dogson" and "Hatchet") has written the personal history of the head-bashing, numbskull stunts of his boyhood, accomplished with his fearless (and sometimes, brainless) friends in Northwestern Minnesota. They were bored rural kids with big imaginations looking for some fun and adventure. So, intentionally or not, Paulsen and his pals found themselves speed skiers, hang-gliders, bungee-jumpers and skateboarders decades before they became know as extreme sports, and in some cases, decades before the activities were even imagined. It's that innocent, accidental nature of their ludicrous stunts, and the boneheaded ways that they found themselves risking life and limb, that's so absolutely hilarious and imminently relatable. "This book is dedicated to all boys in their thirteenth year," Paulsen says at the outset. "The miracle is that we live through it." Subtitled "And Other Outrageous Tales About Extreme Sports," the contemporary spin on the cover gives no hint that the book's insides contain personal tales from Gary Paulsen's 1940's childhood, when PF Flyer sneakers, nickel Cokes and radio dramas were the rage. The joke's on us, and it's a good one; the cover is bound to pull in pre-teen boys in droves, thinking it's a modern history of x-game sports. By the time they realize it's a nostalgic account -- set in the dark ages before most kids had TV, for God's sake -- it'll be too late: they'll be hooked on the jaw-droppingly dangerous stunts shockingly performed without helmets, parental supervision or common sense of any kind. Considering the sadistic popularity of full-throttle sports and idiotic programming like MTV's "Jackass," the snappy stories here are strangely contemporary in their own folksy way, despite the absence of pop culture shock. Still, essentially these new testosterone-generating kids aren't unlike boys today, given the means and some extra time on their hands. They didn't think anything of dragging a friend on skis -- by car -- going 80 miles per hour to beat the old record they saw on newsreel footage at a matinee movie. Why not? The record doesn't say anything about having ski downhill, by yourself. Could, in fact, these kids have built the first skateboard with chunky skate wheels and a plank? Well, hmm, maybe. Will an army surplus target kite fly with a hockey stick handle? Yep, as it turns out. But it might have flown better if Emil had let go before disappearing in the stratosphere. Bear-wrestling? Sure, anything to impress the girls. Paulsen's naturally deadpan storytelling is a marvel, giving doomed glimpses into the disasterous outcomes at just the right moment, and coloring the misadventures with slapstick humor and remarkably familiar characters. In the end, Paulsen leaves us with unforgettable stories so crisp, so warm and so detailed that readers will find it comfortingly hard to forget. 2003, Wendy Lamb Books / Random House, 160 pages, $12.95.

Elizabeth Bush (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February 2003 (Vol. 56, No. 6))
Paulsen again mines his memory lode and extracts five hilarious tales from his adolescence, revolving around ideas that seemed brilliant in conception but proved seriously flawed in execution. At the time it certainly seemed reasonable that skiing while tethered to the bumper of the town hot-rodder’s muscle car could break the world speed record, or that flying a World War II surplus target kite need not require going personally airborne. Why shouldn’t “one-speed fat-tired bikes with a crowned-up, castrating brace bar” make the classic daredevil barrel jump? And how could girls fail to be impressed with the machismo of a teenage boy who can last sixty seconds in a pit with a wrestling sideshow bear? One strongly suspects that the stories have gained considerable momentum, embellishment, and polish in the retelling, but the swapping of strict veracity for topnotch yarn is a bargain of a trade-off: “At the height of his arc the rope snapped tight at eighty miles an hour and snaked him back under the snow, where for two heartbeats he looked for all the world like a high-speed gopher.” Every kid who’s been the butt of parental exasperation--“Where were you when they handed out the brains?”--will find kindred spirits here. (Reviewed from galleys) Review Code: R -- Recommended. (c) Copyright 2003, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 2003, Lamb, 160p, $14.99 and $12.95. Grades 6-9.

Horn Book (The Horn Book Guide, Fall 2003)
This is Paulsen's take on extreme sports, 1950s-style, when a few supplies from the army surplus and equal measures of guts and teenage lunacy were all it took to fly over town on a giant kite, wrestle bears, and hitch skateboard rides off the bumpers of Hudsons. The book is awash in nostalgia and goes off on many tangents but never loses its cranked-up pace and comic tone. Category: Nonfiction-Biographies. 2003, Random/Lamb, 113pp, $12.95, $14.99. Ages 9 to 12. Rating: 2: Superior, well above average.

Loveta Campbell (The Lorgnette - Heart of Texas Reviews (Vol. 16, No. 2))
Gary Paulson keeps his bemused readers anxiously waiting for the next hilarious episode as he tells tales of growing up in a small town in northern Minnesota. He writes, in simple language and in a manner that holds the reader's attention, how he and his group of thirteen-year-old friends entertained themselves in the 1940s and early 1950s. Paulson easily grips the reader's attention as he describes the lack of the numerous inventions and gadgets available today and how he and his friends cleverly improvised to make things happen. And, happen they do. These thirteen-year-olds try speed skiing, hang gliding, skateboarding, shooting a waterfall in a barrel, and other stunts--all with homemade equipment. The results are side splitting. They do want to impress the girls. HOW ANGEL PETERSON GOT HIS NAME is an easy-reading hardback book with an eye-catching design. It incites laughter from beginning to ending. This is a must read book for middle school students as well as for adults who want to remember being thirteen. Paulson is an acclaimed author of many books including three Newbury Honor books. Nonfiction (813 or biography), Highly Recommended. Grades 4-8. 2003, Wendy Lamb Books, 111p., $12.95. Ages 9 to 14.

Sherrie Williams (VOYA, April 2003 (Vol. 26, No. 1))
This quick read features nostalgic true stories about Paulsen at the age of thirteen, as he and his friends undertake a series of ill-advised stunts, insisting that they are driven by a "thirst for scientific knowledge." This thirst is more accurately described as the recklessness and sense of immortality common to many thirteen-year-old boys. The title story documents their attempt to break the world record for speed on skis, while being towed behind a souped-up car driven by the toughest kid in town. They later inadvertently hang glide with Army surplus target kites, and the unfortunately named Orvis Orvison wrestles a live bear at a carnival, driven by that powerful force in a young boy's life-showing off for girls. These true stories are appealing, if brief and light. They would make excellent read-alouds or serve as the basis for introducing storytelling. This book is an excellent companion to Paulsen's several recent autobiographies for young adults, particularly Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books (Random House, 2001/VOYA June 2001) and My Life in Dog Years (Delacorte, 1998/VOYA April 1998). Although the book is set in the early fifties, the experiences are so universal to teen boys that they do not seem dated. The promise of the subtitle is delivered in a rollicking and memorable fashion. This book would appeal to reluctant readers, both in its brevity and the exciting content. VOYA CODES: 3Q 3P M J S (Readable without serious defects; Will appeal with pushing; Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2003, Wendy Lamb Books/Random House, 160p, $12.95. PLB, $14.99. Ages 11 to 18.