Menu
Maybe someday
43
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
43/100Critics
43/100Scholars
Author:
Bonnie Tsui
Publisher:
Algonquin Books
Date:
April 14, 2020
Bonnie Tsui looks at our love affair with the water, from evolution to mythology, from survival and well-being, from community swim clubs to competitive races. Tsui, a swimmer herself, dives into the deep, from the San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating what about waterâdespite its dangersâseduces us and why we come back to it again and again.
What The Reviewers Say
Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, an enthusiastic and thoughtful work mixing history, journalism and elements of memoir, is ostensibly focused on those who do swim, rather than those who don’t. Tsui sets out to answer her title’s question with a compassionate understanding of how that mind game stops some and a curiosity about how and why it seduces others.
... succeeds brilliantly.
Profiles of Olympic swimmers, long distance swimmers, and others who swim in brutally cold water for therapeutic reasons punctuate the text, in addition to Tsui’s own lifelong experiences in water. In all, Why We Swim is a celebration of the many varieties of joy that swimming brings to our oxygen-breathing species. That we choose to swim, knowing the danger, can only be explained by the pleasure it brings..
Deep within this book is this hint of a personal family memoir as told through the great swimming escapades of her life.
