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Title details for Swim by Lynn Sherr - Available

Swim

Why We Love the Water

by Lynn Sherr
ebook
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1 of 1 copy available
Swim is a celebration of swimming and the effect it has on our lives. It's an inquiry into why we swim — the lure, the hold, the timeless magic of being in the water. It's a look at how swimming has changed over the millennia, how this ancient activity is becoming more social than solitary today. It's about our relationship with the water, with our fishy forebearers, and with the costumes that we wear. You'll even find a few songs to sing when you push out those next laps.
Swimming enthusiast Lynn Sherr explores every aspect of the sport, from the biology of swimming to the fame of Esther Williams; from turquoise pools and wild water to the training of Olympians; and she reveals the secret of buoyancy so that anyone can avoid the example of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who lamented, "Why can't I swim, it seems so very easy?" When his friend, the biographer Edward John Trelawny, said, "because you think you can't," Shelley plunged into Italy's Arno River and dropped like a rock. With Swim, you can avoid that happening to you.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 3, 2012

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781610390477

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781610390477
      • File size: 9180 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      March 1, 2012
      A collection of swimming traditions and anecdotes wrapped in a celebration of the pleasures involved. Former ABC News correspondent Sherr (Outside the Box: My Unscripted Life of Love, Loss, and Television News, 2008, etc.) is a lifelong swimmer, and her passion for the act, from a lazy bobbing in gentle waves to a hard push across the Hellespont (aka the Dardanelles)--her story of which is tracked at intervals throughout the narrative--issues from each of these pages. Even when her comments are at their most random--e.g., "Swimming...allows you to dream big dreams"--her enthusiasm propels the book forward. That enthusiasm bleeds over into her history of swimming, which has a gratifyingly great sweep. Sherr moves from the deep past, when immersing oneself was only typical during wartime, to Leander and Lord Byron making their own Hellespont dash, to Benjamin Franklin (who wrote, "I thought it likely, that if I were to remain in England and open a Swimming School, I might get a good deal of Money"), to the coming of spandex. With a breezy touch, the author chronicles the evolution of public bathing, in the process revealing the disdain with which some purists view swimming pools: "Swimming under a roof to me is like big game hunting in a zoo. All legitimate fascination goes," said Annette Kellerman, one of swimming's grand dames. Sherr also explores the application of physics on competitive swimming and on miracle fibers in the latest swimsuits. From start to finish, she searches for the essence of why swimming has touched so many, be it Oliver Sacks ("I never knew anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant") or Chairman Mao ("Do you swim? Water is a good thing"). Sherr sends a sweet valentine, with enough background to keep it interesting, to a love that has never let her down.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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