Just about every other person in the world seems like an unfocused dilettante compared to long-distance swimming legend Lynne Cox. Soon At the age of 14, after several years of training hard in pools and the open sea, she was swimming the 26 mile stretch from Catalina Island to the coast of California. A year after that, she surpassed a lifelong goal by not only swimming the English Channel but setting a new men's and women's record in the process. Rather than be satisfied, Cox aimed still higher, conquering the Cook Strait in New Zealand, the Strait of Magellan and, the Cape of Good Hope, none of which had been swum before. Being the first to swim the Bering Sea from Alaska to what was then the Soviet Union is perhaps Cox's most impressive achievement, requiring a phenomenal amount of physical strength and endurance to withstand the chilly waters and diplomatic persistence to gain permission from Gorbachev during the Cold War. Swimming to Antarctica is Cox's remarkably detailed account of her major swims and all that went right and wrong with them. While there are plenty of highs, as one might expect in a memoir by so impressive an athlete, all is not sunshine and roses for Cox. She overcomes extreme physical hardship, predatory sharks, and a swim through a sewage-soaked Nile while suffering from dysentery. There is plenty in Swimming to Antarctica to encourage even non-swimmers to work hard to achieve the seemingly impossible, but Cox, a skilled and highly readable writer, sticks to the swimming, leading the reader by example. For thrills and inspiration, it's hard to find anyone better than Lynne Cox. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
Cox, one of the world's leading long-distance swimmers, has been a risk-taker ever since she was nine and chose the freezing water of a New Hampshire pool in a storm over getting out and doing calisthenics. After her family moved to California so she and her siblings could train as speed swimmers, she discovered long-distance ocean swimming. Her first open-water event, a team race across the Catalina Channel, convinced her to train for the English Channel. At 15, she broke the Channel record, and decided she needed a new goal. Up to this point, Cox's story reads like a fairy tale of hard work, careful planning and good support, crowned with success. It isn't until she competes in the Nile River swim that the tale turns ugly-she's swimming in raw sewage and chemical waste, fending off the dead rats and broken glass, so sick with dysentery she lands in the hospital. Undeterred, she plans more ambitious swims-around the shark-infested Cape of Good Hope, across Alaska's Glacier Bay-to prepare for her big dream, a swim from Alaska to the Soviet Union across the Bering Strait. While offering herself to researchers studying the effects of cold on the human body, her political goals are even larger: to bring countries and peoples together, using swimming "to establish bridges between borders." Cox ends her story with her swim to Antarctica, where she finishes the first Antarctic mile in 32-degree water in 25 minutes. Even though readers know she survived to tell the tale, it's a thrilling, awesome and well-written story.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
As this inspiring memoir makes clear, swimming is Cox's life. "Cox is not just in the sea," notes the Rocky Mountain News, "she is one with it." Cox offers intimate glimpses into her mind as she conquers icy (Antarctic) or rat-strewn (Nile) waters--her doubts, joys, and observations of unfamiliar surroundings. It's a compelling narrative, but critics disagree on a few points. Is her writing poetic or reportorial? Does she offer a complete or one-sided picture of her life? Where's the larger historical perspective? Quibbles aside, Cox successfully and joyfully captures the mental, physical, and political (think: America, Russia, Bering Strait) battles she overcomes each time she jumps into new waters. "As far as I knew," she writes, "I would only be here once, and I wanted to live as much as I could." Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
Cox was a girl when she discovered the joys of swimming in open water. She was good at it, too, blessed with the perfect physique for long, cold swims. She dreamed of crossing the English Channel and, at age 15, set a new record doing just that. More stunning swims followed: New Zealand's tide-whipped Cook Strait, Chile's stormy Strait of Magellan, and South Africa's shark-swarmed Cape of Good Hope. She battled stonewalling Soviets for a decade before gaining permission for a goodwill swim from the U.S. to the USSR in the frigid Bering Strait. Cox is a pleasure. In an era when so many athletes are motivated by greed and ego, she seems utterly genuine. She studies her body like a scientist but writes about water with a winning, simple poeticism. Many passages are grip-the-page exciting, whether she's dodging Antarctic icebergs or Nile River sewage. Her wide-eyed idealism may seem a little corny at first, but by the end we're rooting for her, wondering if brave and mostly solitary acts (huge support crews are necessary) don't bring us together after all. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Now in paperback, with photos and maps added especially for this new edition, here is the acclaimed life story of a woman whose drive and determination inspire everyone she touches.

Lynne Cox started swimming almost as soon as she could walk. By age sixteen, she had broken all records for swimming the English Channel. Her daring eventually led her to the Bering Strait, where she swam five miles in thirty-eight-degree water in just a swimsuit, cap, and goggles. In between those accomplishments, she became the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, narrowly escaped a shark attack off the Cape of Good Hope, and was cheered across the twenty-mile Cook Strait of New Zealand by dolphins. She even swam a mile in the Antarctic.

Lynne writes the same way she swims, with indefatigable spirit and joy, and shares the beauty of her time in the water with a poet's eye for detail. She has accomplished yet another feat--writing a new classic of sports memoir.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
A world-class athlete on the order of cyclist Lance Armstrong or triathlon champ Mark Allen, Lynn Cox has accomplished some amazing goals during her extraordinary career as a long-distance swimmer. At 15, she crossed the English Channel in record time; she was the first swimmer to navigate the Strait of Magellan and to round the Cape of Good Hope; and in 1987, she fulfilled a lifelong dream by swimming across the Bering Strait as a gesture of goodwill between the U.S. and Russia. But beyond the thrill of breaking records and meeting challenges, Cox is driven by her spirit of adventure and a boundless love of the open sea -- a mysterious, mutable medium that produces in her an almost Zen-like bliss that radiates from every page of this delightful memoir.

In sparkling prose that evokes each euphoric moment, she recounts the highlights of an astonishing career that began at age 14 with her first nighttime swim in the phosphorescent waters of Catalina Channel, where flying fish sailed over her head in giddy, iridescent arcs. Buoyed -- literally -- by a perfectly balanced ratio of body fat to muscle, Cox's plump physique endowed her with an unusual tolerance for cold water, motivating her to undertake ever more ambitious challenges culminating in the event of the book's title: her historic one-mile swim to Antarctica in bone-numbing 32-degree waters.

Shot through with colorful portraits of family and friends and vignettes of the daunting challenges she has faced (dead rats, treacherous whirlpools, man-eating sharks, and glacial ice, to name a few), Cox's autobiography also includes fascinating tidbits of meteorological, navigational, and medical arcana. Dive into it for a mesmerizing read! Anne Markowski

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this extraordinary book, the world's most extraordinary distance swimmer writes about her emotional and spiritual need to swim and about the almost mystical act of swimming itself.

Lynne Cox trained hard from age nine, working with an Olympic coach, swimming five to twelve miles each day in the Pacific. At age eleven, she swam even when hail made the water "like cold tapioca pudding" and was told she would one day swim the English Channel. Four years later - not yet out of high school - she broke the men's and women's world records for the Channel swim. In 1987, she swam the Bering Strait from America to the Soviet Union - a feat that, according to Gorbachev, helped diminish tensions between Russia and the United States.

Lynne Cox's relationship with the water is almost mystical: she describes swimming as flying, and remembers swimming at night through flocks of flying fish the size of mockingbirds, remembers being escorted by a pod of dolphins that came to her off New Zealand.

Lynne Cox has swum the Mediterranean, the three-mile Strait of Messina, under the ancient bridges of Kunning Lake, below the old summer palace of the emperor of China in Beijing. Breaking records no longer interests her. She writes about the ways in which these swims instead became vehicles for personal goals, how she sees herself as the lone swimmer among the waves, pitting her courage against the odds, drawn to dangerous places and treacherous waters that, since ancient times, have challenged sailors in ships.

SYNOPSIS

Cox was inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame in 2000, and between her plunges, has written extensively about her adventures. Some of the two dozen essays here have appeared in The New Yorker or The Los Angeles Times. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Cox, one of the world's leading long-distance swimmers, has been a risk-taker ever since she was nine and chose the freezing water of a New Hampshire pool in a storm over getting out and doing calisthenics. After her family moved to California so she and her siblings could train as speed swimmers, she discovered long-distance ocean swimming. Her first open-water event, a team race across the Catalina Channel, convinced her to train for the English Channel. At 15, she broke the Channel record, and decided she needed a new goal. Up to this point, Cox's story reads like a fairy tale of hard work, careful planning and good support, crowned with success. It isn't until she competes in the Nile River swim that the tale turns ugly-she's swimming in raw sewage and chemical waste, fending off the dead rats and broken glass, so sick with dysentery she lands in the hospital. Undeterred, she plans more ambitious swims-around the shark-infested Cape of Good Hope, across Alaska's Glacier Bay-to prepare for her big dream, a swim from Alaska to the Soviet Union across the Bering Strait. While offering herself to researchers studying the effects of cold on the human body, her political goals are even larger: to bring countries and peoples together, using swimming "to establish bridges between borders." Cox ends her story with her swim to Antarctica, where she finishes the first Antarctic mile in 32-degree water in 25 minutes. Even though readers know she survived to tell the tale, it's a thrilling, awesome and well-written story. (Jan.) Forecast: Knopf plans lots of media for this inspirational book, including a nine-city author tour, a profile in Biography magazine, an appearance on NPR, ads in USA Today and features in women's, sports and travel magazines. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Cox shares with her readers a truly amazing life. She was a gifted swimmer from her childhood, and it quickly became apparent that her strength was in long-distance swimming rather than the comparatively short races of Olympic competition. After setting a record for swimming the English Channel when she was only 15, she longed to make a difference in the world with her skill and realized that swimming from shore to shore symbolically brought the two together. She immediately set her sights on swimming the Bering Strait between Alaska and the then-Soviet Union. Much of the book details her 12-year odyssey to get permission for this swim, but she also eloquently writes of her other record-setting swims, including the Strait of Magellan and around the Cape of Good Hope, where she was nearly attacked by a shark. And, of course, there is her frigid 1.06-mile swim to Antarctica in 32-degree water. The writing is workmanlike at best, but Cox's sincerity and her love for the sport shine through, making this a good addition to all sports collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/03.]-Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews