Swimming Toward the Ocean

Swimming Toward the Ocean PDF Author: Carole L. Glickfeld
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Nineteen fifty-three, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Chenia Arnow is a petite, sensuous Betty Grable look-alike, a Russian emigre whose Old World fear of the Evil Eye and heavily accented English cannot mask her fierce intelligence and wit. Her husband, Ruben, is both a charmer and miserly, often absent, with a penchant for trumped-up lawsuits. He has a mistress. Chenia is pregnant. It is this child, Chenia's daughter Devorah, who tells the story of her parents' marriage: of how Chenia embarks on a love affair with the man in the green fedora, and how Chenia's initial shame and guilt are overcome; of how the affair threatens to end when Ruben suddenly moves his family closer to the home of the woman who is his lover. And Devorah tells us how the increasingly complex and comical deceptions that accompany her parents' infidelities come to infuse and dominate their lives, how the marriage finally ends, and how another marriage is made--a solid marriage, a different kind of marriage. But Chenia is Chenia, still sometimes longing for the pull of danger and the tumble of the Atlantic Ocean, for a glimpse of a green fedora. Swimming Toward the Ocean is a novel that both touches and entertains us with its portrayal of the human heart.

Swimming Toward the Ocean

Swimming Toward the Ocean PDF Author: Carole L. Glickfeld
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nineteen fifty-three, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Chenia Arnow is a petite, sensuous Betty Grable look-alike, a Russian emigre whose Old World fear of the Evil Eye and heavily accented English cannot mask her fierce intelligence and wit. Her husband, Ruben, is both a charmer and miserly, often absent, with a penchant for trumped-up lawsuits. He has a mistress. Chenia is pregnant. It is this child, Chenia's daughter Devorah, who tells the story of her parents' marriage: of how Chenia embarks on a love affair with the man in the green fedora, and how Chenia's initial shame and guilt are overcome; of how the affair threatens to end when Ruben suddenly moves his family closer to the home of the woman who is his lover. And Devorah tells us how the increasingly complex and comical deceptions that accompany her parents' infidelities come to infuse and dominate their lives, how the marriage finally ends, and how another marriage is made--a solid marriage, a different kind of marriage. But Chenia is Chenia, still sometimes longing for the pull of danger and the tumble of the Atlantic Ocean, for a glimpse of a green fedora. Swimming Toward the Ocean is a novel that both touches and entertains us with its portrayal of the human heart.

Swimming to the Top of the Tide

Swimming to the Top of the Tide PDF Author: Patricia Hanlon
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN: 1942658885
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Four seasons of immersion in New England’s Great Marsh “Like Wendell Berry and Rachel Carson, Hanlon is a true poet-ecologist, sharing in exquisitely resonant prose her patient observations of nature’s most intimate details. As she and her husband, through summer and snow, swim their local creeks and estuaries, we marvel at the timeless yet fragile terrain of both marshlands and marriage. This is the book to awaken all of us, right now, to how our coastline is changing and what it means for our future.” —Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and A House Among the Trees The Great Marsh is the largest continuous stretch of salt marsh in New England, extending from Cape Ann to New Hampshire. Patricia Hanlon and her husband built their home and raised their children alongside it. But it is not until the children are grown that they begin to swim the tidal estuary daily. Immersing herself, she experiences, with all her senses in all seasons, the vigor of a place where the two ecosystems of fresh and salt water mix, merge, and create new life. In Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Hanlon lyrically charts her explorations, at once intimate and scientific. Noting the disruptions caused by human intervention, she bears witness to the vitality of the watersheds, their essential role in the natural world, and the responsibility of those who love them to contribute to their sustainability. Patricia Hanlon is a visual artist who paints the beautiful ecosystem of New England’s Great Marsh and is involved in the watershed organizations of Greater Boston. Swimming to the Top of the Tide is her first book.

Grayson

Grayson PDF Author: Lynne Cox
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307495752
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Part mystery, part magical tale, this is the story of a miraculous ocean encounter that happened to the adventurer, swimmer, and bestselling author when she was seventeen and in training for a big swim. It was the dark of early morning; Lynne was in 55-degree water as smooth as black ice, two hundred yards offshore, outside the wave break. She was swimming her last half-mile back to the pier before heading home for breakfast when she became aware that something was swimming with her. The ocean was charged with energy as if a squall was moving in; thousands of baby anchovy darted through the water like lit sparklers, trying to evade something larger. Whatever it was, it felt large enough to be a white shark coursing beneath her body. It wasn’t a shark. It became clear that it was a baby gray whale—following alongside Lynne for a mile or so. Lynne had been swimming for more than an hour; she needed to get out of the water to rest, but she realized that if she did, the young calf would follow her onto shore and die from collapsed lungs. The baby whale—eighteen feet long!—was migrating on a three-month trek to its feeding grounds in the Bering Sea, an eight-thousand-mile journey. It would have to be carried on its mother’s back for much of that distance, and was dependent on its mother’s milk for food—baby whales drink up to fifty gallons of milk a day. If Lynne didn’t find the mother whale, the baby would suffer from dehydration and starve to death. Something so enormous—the mother whale was fifty feet long—suddenly seemed very small in the vast Pacific Ocean. How could Lynne possibly find her?

Ocean Soul

Ocean Soul PDF Author: Brian Skerry
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426208162
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A collection of Brian Skerry's ocean photography, including sharks in the Bahamas, leatherback sea turtles in Trinidad, and right whales in the Auckland Islands.

Ocean

Ocean PDF Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501348647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience. From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Swimming Without a Net

Swimming Without a Net PDF Author: MaryJanice Davidson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780515143812
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
As Fred the Mermaid tries to fit in with her own kind, she finds herself hooked on both Artur, the High Prince of the undersea realm, and Thomas, a hunky marine biologist. She's also caught between two factions of merfolk: those happy with swimming under the radar-and those who want to bring their existence to the surface.

Swimming with Sharks

Swimming with Sharks PDF Author: Heather Lang
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
ISBN: 0807521884
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
2017 Amelia Bloomer List, Early Readers Nonfiction This picture book biography follows the life of Eugenie Clark, the Japanese-American scientist, researcher, and diver, who became famous as "The Shark Lady" for her groundbreaking discoveries about shark behavior. Before Eugenie Clark's groundbreaking research, most people thought sharks were vicious, blood-thirsty killers. From the first time she saw a shark in an aquarium, Japanese-American Eugenie was enthralled. Instead of frightening and ferocious eating machines, she saw sleek, graceful fish gliding through the water. After she became a scientist—an unexpected career path for a woman in the 1940s—she began taking research dives and training sharks, earning her the nickname "The Shark Lady."

Strokes of Genius

Strokes of Genius PDF Author: Eric Chaline
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238908
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
What could be better than diving into cool water on a hot day? In this enormously enjoyable and informative history of swimming, Eric Chaline sums up this most summery of moments with one phrase: pleasure beckons at the water’s edge. Strokes of Genius traces the history of swimming from the first civilizations to its current worldwide popularity as a sport, fitness pastime, and leisure activity. Chaline explores swimming’s role in ritual, early trade and manufacturing, warfare, and medicine, before describing its transformation in the early modern period into a leisure activity and a competitive sport—the necessary precursors that have made it the most common physical pastime in the developed world. The book celebrates the physicality and sensuality of swimming—attributes that Chaline argues could have contributed to the evolution of the human species. Swimming, like other disciplines that use repetitive movements to train the body and quiet the mind, is also a means of spiritual awakening—a personal journey of discovery. Swimming has attained the status of a cultural marker, denoting eroticism, leisure, endurance, adventure, exploration, and excellence. Strokes of Genius shows that there is not a single story of human swimming, but many currents that merge, diverge, and remerge. Chaline argues that swimming will become particularly important as we look toward a warmer future in which our survival may depend on our ability to adapt to life in an aquatic world.

Swimming to Antarctica

Swimming to Antarctica PDF Author: Lynne Cox
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307547876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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.

Haunts of the Black Masseur

Haunts of the Black Masseur PDF Author: Charles Sprawson
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307823644
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In a masterful work of cultural history, Charles Sprawson, himself an obsessional swimmer and fluent diver, explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water, and the search for the springs of classical antiquity. In nineteenth-century England bathing was thought to be an instrument of social and moral reform, while in Germany and America swimming came to signify escape. For the Japanese the swimmer became an expression of samurai pride and nationalism. Sprawson gives is fascinating glimpses of the great swimming heroes: Byron leaping dramatically into the surf at Shelley’s beach funeral; Rupert Brooke swimming naked with Virginia Woolf, the dark water “smelling of mint and mud”; Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico; Edgar Allan Poe’s lone and mysterious river-swims; Leander, Webb, Weissmuller, and a host of others. Informed by the literature of Swinburne, Goethe, Scott Fitzgerald, and Yukio Mishima; the films of Riefenstahl and Vigo; the Hollywood “swimming musicals” of the 1930s; and delving in and out of Olympic history, Haunts of the Black Masseur is an enthralling assessment of man—body submerged, self-absorbed. It is quite simply the best celebration of swimming ever written, even as it explores aspects of culture in a heretofore unimagined way.