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I opened this little book (160 small pages) with
a certain degree of trepidation because animal stories, whether
they be tales of favored pets or encounters in the wild, are a
mixed bag. My worries didn't last long - Grayson is a
pure delight that reads like a fable but is actually true. At the center of the story is Lynne Cox, now a
renowned long-distance swimmer, but then just a 17-years-old out
for a practice swim early one morning in the waters off
Seal
Beach in Southern California.
The whale tale forms the center of the story but, for me, it was
the bit players that stole the show - the rays wallowing in the
warm water under the pier, the sun fish snoozling close to the
legs of the oil rig, the green sea turtles "carrying their homes
along with them like aquatic RVs" and the herd of dolphins vying
with each other to perform the most dare-devilish tricks (I thought the collective noun for dolphins was
pod, but Lynne refers to them as a herd, and I'm not the
landlubber to question her!)
A couple of reviewers felt that some of Lynne Cox's observations were a
little overdone (such as "if I believe, if I work toward
something ... the impossible isn't impossible at all"). I
beg to disagree. Firstly, such comments are few and far between and
secondly, if they were issuing from the mouth of the latest
"motivational speaker" I would probably agree, but coming from
Lynne they seem to be a simple statement of fact (see below
for her extraordinary biography). All in all, this is an adult
book that can be enjoyed by a wide range of ages from about
12-years upwards.
What I found particularly poignant, for want of a better word,
is that Lynne waited 30 years to write down her story, but
during this time she has obviously pondered over her experience
many times and even made it a foundational event on which to
build her life. However, when she returned to her family late
for breakfast that day she says simply, "I told my mother and
father what had happened that morning. I told them I had swum
with a baby whale and that friends had helped him find his
mother. I didn't make a big deal about it." This leads me to
wonder what experiences our own children have had or will have which will
prove pivotal in their lives, and how many of these we as
parents, perhaps even they, will be aware of at the time!
About the Author
At age 9 Lynne Cox began her swimming career in Manchester, NH with
the Manchester Swim Team. Her coach was
Ben Muritt, the Harvard University
coach. At age 12, Lynne moved with her
family to Los Alamitos California where
she began training with Don Gambril,
coach of four US Olympic Swim teams.
When she was 14 she swam across the
Catalina Channel with a group of
teenagers from Seal Beach, California.
They swam a distance of 27 miles in 12
hours and 36 minutes. The following year
(1972) she swam across the English
Channel and shattered the men's and
women's world records with a time of 9
hours and 57 minutes. A year later she
returned to England and broke the men's
world record for the English Channel a
second time with a time of 9 hours and
36 minutes. At 17 she returned to the
Catalina Channel and broke the men's and
women's world records with a time of 8
hours and 48 minutes. The year after
that, at 18 years old, she became the
first woman to swim across Cook Strait
between the North and South Islands of
New Zealand. Her time was 12 hour and 2
1/2 minutes.
Since then she has regularly broken
records including the men's and women's
world record for swimming the Oresund
between Denmark and Sweden with a time
of 5 hours and 9 minutes; and the men's
and women's record for swimming across
the Kattegut between Norway to Sweden in
a time of 6 hours and 16 minutes.
Not content with breaking other people's
records she then started to swim
stretches of water never before
attempted. In 1976 she became the first
person to swim across the 42°F waters of
the Strait of Magellan with a time of 1
hour 2 minutes; and in 1977 she became
the first person to swim between three
of the Aleutian Islands, then she swam 8
miles around the Cape of Good Hope
(again a first). A couple of years later
she swam across three lakes in New
Zealand's Southern Alps .... the list
goes on and on - you can read it in full
at
her website. More recently (2002)
she became the first person to complete
a 1.2 mile swim in Antarctica, in a time
of 25 minutes. She was inducted into the
Swimming Hall of Fame in 2000.
Grayson is Lynne Cox's second
book following Swimming to Antarctica
(2005).
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2006, and has been updated for the February 2008 edition. Click here to go to this issue.
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