I read Hatchet when it was assigned for my kids in school. I loved the story and have now read several of Gary Paulsen's books. These may have been written for kids but they still have plenty of interest and excitement for this adult!

My only complaint is that I wish it was longer. This guy's is rad

Guts: The True Stories behind Hatchet and the Brian Books is a collection of non-fiction pieces by Gary Paulsen narrating the real events from his life which he used as the inspiration for his most famous YA novels. In the first chapter he explains how as a volunteer on rural ambulance calls he arrived as a first responder to many situations involving heart attacks and other dire emergencies. As a child he happened to have witnessed a plane ditching at sea, so the chapter explains how he came to the details used early in Hatchet.

There is another chapter devoted to moose attacks (largely experienced while training for and competing in dog sled races) and another one entitled “Things That Hurt.” My personal favorite was “Killing to Live: Hunting and Fishing with Primitive Weapons” which details many of the youthful and largely solitary pastimes that appeared later in his writing, including constructing his own bow and arrows from scratch.

The book is eminently readable and told in the author’s adventure-prose style. It is a fun independent reading text for upper elementary and middle schools students and might be an especially easy way to push students who only reach for fiction into trying a different genre. I believe it could be used in an interesting unit as a companion text for one of Paulsen’s novellas. The class could compare and contrast the two to discuss authorial style and examine the differences in purpose between fiction and non-fiction writing.

Yes, I love Hatchet and the Brian books, so I was very interested to read the true stories behind those books. I like the fiction better.

The true stories behind the author’s popular(?) series of books. I’d never heard of Gary Paulsen (or his books), but it seems that the man has led a heck of an adventurous life. The stories are sprinkled with tidbits of woodcraft, but probably I wouldn’t recommend this very short book to anyone who hadn’t read the author’s other work.

Paulsen reveals what books inspired him to write the Brian books

Guts by Gary Paulsen is a very intresting book about the times that he lived in Alaska, but it's also about Paulsens' other books that he wrote like Hatchet. In Guts, Paulsen talks about the hardships and struggles he had to go through when he lived in Alaska. He writes about a guy named Brian, but all the experiences that Brain went through were all experiences that Gary had went through himself such as plane crashes, and other near missed that he went through living in the wilderness.
In the book, Paulsen also talks about the funny but bad incidents that happened while he was staying the in wilderness like how he attrached millions of mosquitoes, or when he ran into a moose with a "sense of humor". It's crazy to think how he could have survived everything that happened to him while he was away like being trampled by a moose or surviving a plane crash.

This is a great book. This book is one of the best books that I have read. It is great story written from Gary Paulsen which is a good writer. Everybody please read this book if you like fun stories.

Very rarely do audiences get an inside look at the experiences and thought-processes that make an author who he or she is. Gary Paulsen's "Guts" does this. The book was written for a very clear purpose- to describe the hard experiences and lessons that Paulsen used as fodder for the writing of best-seller books like "Dogsong" and "Hatchet." If you like harrowing, wilderness-based stories full of woodcraft and danger, you'll like this book. You'll also like this book if you are interested in how an author hones his craft, as Paulsen takes time to describe what causes him to put paper to pencil and how and why he writes the way he does.

An action-packed quick read that tells the harrowing true stories of near misses and almost crashes. Paulsen based his Brian Robeson books (Hatchet, The River, Brian’s Winter, and Brian’s Return) on events that actually happened to him, or on things that he could do, making the reader realize that the author has seen a lot of death….

Two things that I gleaned from the book were that animals are much more dangerous than I think they are, and I’ve been lucky (so far) when I’ve been out in the wilderness. As Paulsen puts it: “It often seems that everything in the wilderness is conspiring to harm you in one way or the other […] The solutions to facing all these dangers […] is knowledge.”

I would recommend this to tweens and teens who enjoy the outdoors, tinkering and repairing things, and reading about gross things to eat (eyeballs). There is also quite a bit of useful information if you happen to wind up lost in the wilderness.

If you like books about testing yourself in the wilderness, you might also enjoy:

Lost in the Barrens, by Farley Mowat, and
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

I have a teacher who Gary Paulsen reminds me of. He'll talk about how he was always out side as a child and hunting, fishing, and being well like Gary Paulsen

“Guts” is a book written about the events that led up to Gary Paulsen writing about Brian Robeson’s story in the books: Hatchet, The River, Brian’s Winter, and Brian’s Return. The first chapter is about the experiences Gary has had with airplanes which is how Brian ends up in the wilderness alone in “Hatchet.” The whole book is basically about all the times Gary has had encounters in the wilderness and how he had to cope with the problems he had.

The main character in “Guts” is Gary Paulsen. There are other characters but they are not as important.

The story is not really written in a set place. Gary talks about all the times he is in the wilderness so you could kind of say it is taken place in the wilderness but it is never really said. It is written from the time he was a young teen to a middle age adult.

The main theme in this book is determination. Gary is saying how he has had so many tough times in the wilderness and he had to be determined to make it out alive. Another theme could be creativeness because Gary has to come up with ways to cook things, and make things while he is out in the wilderness.

Overall, I thought that this book was very good. I always was putting myself in Gary’s shoes asking myself what I would do. I would recommend it to people who like to read books that are written about the wild and like adventure.