Unit 1-from Swimming to Antarctica

Swimming to Antarctica is the autobiography of the long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox. She begins her story at age nine, when she first thought of swimming the English Channel. With the aid of supportive parents and excellent coaches, Cox reaches that goal at age fifteen, setting a time record in the process. Her extraordinary determination and speed propel her to an amazing career, setting
more records and doing more firsts in ocean swimming. The book is an account of her swims in some of the most treacherous and coldest waters in the world, culminating in her 2003 swim off Antarctica.

MORE ABOUT THE WRITER
Lynne Cox has set records all over the world for open-water swimming. She was named Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year, inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2000, and honored with a lifetime achievement award from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lives in Los Alamitos, California.

BACKGROUND
One of the most symbolic swims in the story is Cox’s crossing of the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia in 1987. Cox fought for eleven years to get permission from the Soviet Union to land on its shores. Her tale of the political intrigue surrounding that swim is a history lesson in the tension and suspicion that marked the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Cox’s swim was hailed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as representative of the openness, or
glasnost, that was needed between the two countries. Students may want to research U.S.–Soviet relations during the cold war to better understand the significance of the Bering Strait swim.