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
• At age fourteen, she swam twenty-six miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland.
• At ages fifteen and sixteen, she broke the men’s and women’s world records for swimming the English Channel—a thirty-three-mile crossing in nine hours, thirty-six minutes.
• At eighteen, she swam the twenty-mile Cook Strait between North and South Islands of New Zealand, was caught on a massive swell, found herself after five hours farther from the finish than when she started, and still completed the swim.
• She was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most treacherous three-mile stretch of water in the world.
• The first to swim the Bering Strait—the channel that forms the boundary line between the United States and Russia—from Alaska to Siberia, thereby opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in forty-eight years, swimming in thirty-eight-degree water in four-foot waves without a shark cage, wet suit, or lanolin grease.
• The first to swim the Cape of Good Hope (a shark emerged from the kelp, its jaws wide open, and was shot as it headed straight for her).

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.

She has a photographic memory of her swims. She tells us how she conceived of, planned, and trained for each, and re-creates for us the experience of swimming (almost) unswimmable bodies of water, including her most recent astonishing one-mile swim to Antarctica in thirty-two-degree water without a wet suit. She tells us how, through training and by taking advantage of her naturally plump physique, she is able to create more heat in the water than she loses.

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.


From the Inside Flap
• At age fourteen, she swam twenty-six miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland.
• At ages fifteen and sixteen, she broke the men’s and women’s world records for swimming the English Channel—a thirty-three-mile crossing in nine hours, thirty-six minutes.
• At eighteen, she swam the twenty-mile Cook Strait between North and South Islands of New Zealand, was caught on a massive swell, found herself after five hours farther from the finish than when she started, and still completed the swim.
• She was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most treacherous three-mile stretch of water in the world.
• The first to swim the Bering Strait—the channel that forms the boundary line between the United States and Russia—from Alaska to Siberia, thereby opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in forty-eight years, swimming in thirty-eight-degree water in four-foot waves without a shark cage, wet suit, or lanolin grease.
• The first to swim the Cape of Good Hope (a shark emerged from the kelp, its jaws wide open, and was shot as it headed straight for her).

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.

She has a photographic memory of her swims. She tells us how she conceived of, planned, and trained for each, and re-creates for us the experience of swimming (almost) unswimmable bodies of water, including her most recent astonishing one-mile swim to Antarctica in thirty-two-degree water without a wet suit. She tells us how, through training and by taking advantage of her naturally plump physique, she is able to create more heat in the water than she loses.

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.


About the Author
Lynne Cox was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Los Alamitos, California. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Cox was named Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1975, inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame in 2000, and honored with a lifetime achievement award from U.C. Santa Barbara. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and European Car Magazine. Cox lives in Los Alamitos, California.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. Beginnings

"Please. Please. Please, Coach, let us out of the pool, we're freezing," pleaded three purple-lipped eight-year-olds in lane two.

Coach Muritt scowled at my teammates clinging to the swimming pool wall. Usually this was all he had to do to motivate them, and they'd continue swimming. But this day was different. Ominous black clouds were crouched on the horizon, and the wind was gusting from all different directions. Even though it was a mid-July morning in Manchester, New Hampshire, it felt like it would snow.

Cupping his large hands against his red face, and covering the wine-colored birthmark on his left cheek, Coach Muritt bellowed, "Get off the wall! Swim!"

"We're too cold," the boys protested.

Coach Muritt did not like to be challenged by anyone, let alone three eight-year-old boys. Irritated, he shouted again at the swimmers to get moving, and when they didn't respond, he jogged across the deck with his fist clenched, his thick shoulders hunched against the wind and his short-chopped brown hair standing on end. Anger flashed in his icy blue eyes, and I thought, I'd better swim or I'll get in trouble too, but I wanted to see what was going to happen to the boys.

Coach Muritt shook his head and shouted, "Swim and you'll get warm!"

But the boys weren't budging. They were shaking, their teeth chattering.

"Come on, swim. If you swim, you'll warm up," Coach Muritt coaxed them. He looked up at the sky, then checked his watch, as if trying to decide what to do. In other lanes, swimmers were doing the breaststroke underwater, trying to keep their arms warm. More teammates were stopping at the wall and complaining that they were cold. Laddie and Brooks McQuade, brothers who were always getting into trouble, were breaking rank, climbing out of the pool and doing cannonballs from the deck. Other young boys and girls were joining them.

"Hey, stop it! Someone's going to get hurt--get your butts back in the water!" Coach Muritt yelled. He knew he was losing control, that he had pushed the team as far as we could go, so he waved us in. When all seventy-five of us reached the wall, he motioned for us to move toward a central lane and then he shouted, "Okay, listen up. Listen up. I'll make a deal with you. If I let you get out now, you will all change into something warm and we'll meet in the boys' locker room. Then we will do two hours of calisthenics."

Cheering wildly, my teammates leaped out of the pool, scurried across the deck, grabbed towels slung over the chain-link fence surrounding the pool, and squeezed against one another as they tried to be first through the locker room doors.

Getting out of the water was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I hated doing calisthenics with the team. Usually we did them five days a week for an hour, after our two-hour swimming workout. A typical workout included five hundred sit-ups, two hundred push-ups, five hundred leg extensions, five hundred half sit-ups, two hundred leg lifts on our backs, and two hundred leg lifts on our stomachs. As we did the exercises, Coach Muritt counted and we had to keep pace with him. Between each set of fifty repetitions, he gave us a one-minute break, but if anyone fell off pace or did the exercises incorrectly, he made us start the set all over again. He wanted to make us tough, teach us discipline and team unity. And I didn't mind that. I liked to work hard, and I liked the challenge of staying on pace, but I detested having to start an exercise all over again because someone else was slacking off or fooling around. Brooks and Laddie McQuade were notorious for that. They were always trying to see how much they could get away with before they got caught. For them, it was a big game. Older boys on the team yelled at them and tossed kickboards at them, but they didn't care; they liked the attention they were getting from the team and the coach. I didn't want to play their game, and I didn't want to do two long hours of calisthenics with them, so I shouted, "Coach Muritt, can I stay in the pool and swim?"

He was wiping his eyes and nose with a handkerchief, and asked incredulously, "Jeez, aren't you freezing?"

"If I keep swimming, I'm okay," I said, and smiled, trying my very best to convince him. I was a chubby nine-year-old, and I was a slow swimmer, so I rarely got a chance to stop and take a rest. But because I just kept going, I managed to constantly create body heat, and that way I stayed warm when all the other swimmers were freezing.

"Is there anyone else who wants to stay in the water?"

"We do," said three of his Harvard swimmers in lane one.

During the college season, Muritt coached the Harvard University Swim Team. He was considered to be one of the best coaches in all of New England; at least a dozen of his college swimmers had qualified for the U.S. Nationals. In the summer, most of his college swimmers worked out with our age groupers on the Manchester Swim Team, and they inspired us by their example. Somehow my parents knew from the start that to become your best, you needed to train with the best. And that's why I think they put my older brother, David, me, and my two younger sisters, Laura and Ruth, into Coach Muritt's swimming program.

Coach Muritt studied the sky, and we followed his gaze. "I still don't like the looks of those clouds," he said pensively.

"Coach, we'll get out immediately if it starts to thunder. I promise," I said, and held my breath, hoping he wouldn't make me do calisthenics.

He considered for a moment, but he was distracted by uproarious laughter, high-pitched hoots, and shouts coming from the locker room.

"Please, Coach Muritt, please can we stay in?" I said.

"Okay, but I'll have to take the pace clock or it's going to blow over--you'll have to swim at your own pace for the next couple of hours."

"Thank you, Coach," I said, and clapped my hands; I was doubly thrilled. I had escaped calisthenics and now I was going to be able to swim for three hours straight. I loved swimming and I loved swimming at my own pace, alone in my own lane, with no one kicking water in my face, and no one behind tapping my toes, telling me I had to swim faster. It was a feeling of buoyant freedom. But swimming into a storm was even better; waves were rushing around me, and lifting me, and tossing me from side to side. The wind was howling, slamming against the chain-link fence so strongly that it sounded like the clanging of a warning bell. I felt the vibrations rattle right through my body, and I wondered if the wind would tear the fence from its hinges. Turning on my side to breathe, I checked the sky. It looked like a tornado was approaching, only without the funnel cloud. I wondered for a second if I should climb out of the water. But I pushed that thought away; I didn't want to get out. I was immersed in unbridled energy and supernatural beauty, and I wanted to see what would happen next.

My world was reduced to the blur of my arms stroking as a cold, driving rain began. The raindrops that hit my lips tasted sweet and cold, and I enjoyed the sensations of every new moment. The pool was no longer a flat, boring rectangle of blue; it was now a place of constant change, a place that I had to continually adjust to as I swam or I'd get big gulps of water instead of air. That day, I realized that nature was strong, beautiful, dramatic, and wonderful, and being out in the water during that storm made me feel somehow a part of it, somehow connected to it.

When the hail began, the connection diminished considerably. I scrambled for the gutters while the college swimmers leaped out of the water and ran as fast as they could into the locker room. One looked back at me and shouted, "Aren't you getting out?"

"No, I don't want to," I said, crawling into the gutter by the stairs. The hail came down so fast and hard that all I heard was the rush and pinging of the stones as they hit the deck and pool. Thankful for the white bathing cap and goggles protecting my head and eyes, I covered my cheeks with my hands. Hailstones the size of frozen peas blasted my hands, neck, and shoulders, and I winced and cringed and tried to squeeze into a tighter ball, hoping that it would be over soon.

When the hail finally changed to a heavy rain, I crawled out of the gutter and started swimming again. As I pulled my arms through the water, I felt as if I were swimming through a giant bowl of icy tapioca. The hailstones floated to the water's surface and rolled around my body as I swam through them. I realized that by putting myself in a situation different from everyone else's, I had experienced something different, beautiful, and amazing.

In the parking lot outside, I saw Mrs. Milligan sitting in her car with her headlights aimed at me. Mrs. Milligan was Joyce's mother, and Joyce was the fastest and nicest girl on the team. Joyce had qualified for nationals a couple of times, and I wanted to be just like her. Once I'd asked her why she was so fast. She'd said that she did what Coach Muritt asked of her. It was such a simple statement, but one that was a revelation for me. If I did what Joyce did, then maybe I could also make it to nationals. I wondered how long Mrs. Milligan had been watching me. When I saw my teammates poking their heads out of the locker room, I knew the workout was over, so I climbed out of the pool.

Mrs. Milligan ran to me; her raincoat was plastered to her body and her short brown hair was standing on end. She was carrying a large towel, and when a gust hit it, the towel spread open like a sail. She wrapped it tightly around me and shouted, "How long have you been swimming in this storm?"

"The whole time," I said.

"Oh, my goodness. Coach Muritt let you swim in this?" she said, guiding me quickly into the girls' locker room and putting my hands between hers to warm them.

"He sure did, and I had a lot of fun." I grinned. It had been one of the most enjoyable workouts of my swimming career.

Rubbing the towel rapidly on my back, she bent over and said in my ear, with absolute certainty, "Someday, Lynne, you're going to swim across the English Channel."

It kind of took my breath away, but from the moment she said it, I believed that it could happen. After all, Mrs. Milligan was Joyce's mother, and I knew how her encouragement had helped Joyce become a fast swimmer. Even though I was only nine years old at the time, I somehow knew that one day I would swim the English Channel.

When I stepped out of the locker room, Coach Muritt turned and looked at me with surprise and said, "Are you just getting out of the pool now?"

"Yes, thank you, Coach Muritt. I had so much fun. You know what? Mrs. Milligan said that someday I'm going to swim the English Channel."

He looked at me for a few moments and said, "Yes, I think you will."

I remember telling my mother, as she drove my siblings and me home from workout in her bright red Buick station wagon, "Mom, Mrs. Milligan said that someday I'm going to swim the English Channel."

Without giving it much consideration, she said, "Well, if you train hard, I'm sure someday you probably will."

I couldn't wait to get home. I ran upstairs, grabbed our National Geographic atlas, and flipped through it until I found the page that featured England and France. Then I began to wonder, How far across is the English Channel? Where do you start to swim? I studied the map and the idea began to take hold in my mind. Maybe someday I would swim the English Channel.

2. Leaving Home

Three years later, when I was twelve years old, my father came home from work one winter evening, opened that same atlas to the pages depicting the United States, and placed the map on the dining room table. He motioned for my brother and sisters and me to look at the map.

"Your mother and I have been discussing moving. We believe that if you want to be successful with your swimming, you need to train with a top-notch coach. We've done our research and found that most of the best swimming programs are in these areas," he said, pointing to Arizona, California, and Hawaii.

We crowded around the table, and my mother said, "We're tired of the long, cold winters, and your father would like to work with a new group of radiologists with more up-to-date radiology equipment."

I had never thought of leaving New Hampshire. I loved it there. I loved exploring the wide-open fields of wild red poppies and bright yellow daylilies, the deep emerald forests. I loved gathering brilliantly colored leaves in fall, and building snow caves in the winter. But I knew that I wanted to be a great swimmer.

My father said, "We need to make this decision as a family. If there is anyone who doesn't want to move, we will stay here."

For the next couple of weeks we discussed the idea and finally decided to move to California. And with each day I grew more excited. I'd never been there before, but I'd seen it on television and I expected to be surrounded by ranches and cowboys, and large orange orchards. When we flew over Los Angeles, I couldn't believe what I saw. Below us in the haze of thin smog was a cement city that filled the entire basin, spread to the mountains, and expanded out along the coast. And I had this sinking feeling inside.

Somehow my father knew that it was important for the family to make an immediate connection with California so we would feel like we belonged. He drove us directly from the airport down the 405 freeway to the Belmont Plaza Olympic swimming pool in Long Beach. This was where we would be training with Don Gambril, the head coach for the United States Olympic Team. Gambril had an age-group club team called Phillips 66, which we planned to join, and he coached a college team at California State University, Long Beach. In coaching circles, Gambril was known as one of the best in the world, and because of that he was able to recruit Olympic swimmers from around the world to swim for his college team.

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