Download or read book Were the First People Swimmers written by Judy Kaul and published by . This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your child asks, “Where did we come from?” and you wish you had a scientific explanation of human evolution to answer the question. Or you're grown up and you're still curious.How did our species become so different from the other great apes, or for that matter, from other mammals? More than a century and a half after Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, the mystery of the “missing link” is still unresolved. Scientists agree on approximately when the split occurred between humans and our last common ancestors, but not how.Were the First People Swimmers? introduces the reader to an elegant, rigorous theory by Welsh writer Elaine Morgan, based on a hypothesis by marine biologist Alister Hardy, that our early Homo sapien ancestors evolved through natural selection in water. The theory became known as the Aquatic Ape Theory or “AAT.” Morgan wrote six books on human evolution and the theory.Were the First People Swimmers? guides you, with elementary text and playful illustrations, through empirical evidence that explains how the first humans could have started talking, lost their ability to run on all four legs, lost their fur, and acquired subcutaneous fat.Elaine Morgan provided ideas and feedback in the conception and planning of Were the First People Swimmers? The book encourages observation of nature, critical thinking and inter-generational learning.
Download or read book Splash written by Howard Means and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choose a stroke and get paddling through the human history of swimming! From man's first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the splashing, sparkling pool party in your backyard, humans have been getting wet for 10,000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a ripple that touches us all--the heroes and the ordinary folk; the real and the mythic. Splash! dives into Egypt, winds through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages (at least in Europe), and then reemerges in the wake of the Renaissance before taking its final lap at today's Olympic games. Along the way, it kicks away the idea that swimming is just about moving through water, about speed or great feats of aquatic endurance, and shows you how much more it can be. Its history offers a multi-tiered tour through religion, fashion, architecture, sanitation and public health, colonialism, segregation and integration, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory, and much, much more. Unique and compelling, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history--and just like jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, it has fun along the way.
Download or read book Lido written by Christopher Beanland and published by Batsford Books. This book was released on 2020-08-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of outdoor swimming – looking at the history, design and social aspect of pools. Few experiences can beat diving into a pool in the fresh air, swimming with blue skies above you. Whether it's a dip into a busy and bustling city pool on a sweltering summer day, or taking the plunge in icy waters, the lido provides a place of peace in a frenetic world. The book begins with a history of outdoor pools – their grand beginnings after the buttoned-up Victorian era, their falling popularity in the 20th century, and the newfound appreciation for the outdoor pool, or lido, and outdoor swimming in the 21st century. Journalist and architectural historian Christopher Beanland picks the very best of the outdoor pools around the world, including the Icebergs Pool on Bondi Beach, Australia; the 137m seawater pool in Vancouver, Canada; Siza's concrete sea pools in Porto, Portugal; the restored art deco pool in Saltdean, UK, and the pool at the Zollverein Coal Mines in Essen, Germany. The book also features lost lidos and the fascinating history behind the architecture of the pools, along with essays on swimming pools in art, and the importance of pools in Australia. In addition there are interviews with pool users around the globe about why they swim. The book is illustrated throughout with beautiful colour photography, as well as archive photography and advertising.
Download or read book Shifting Currents written by Karen Eva Carr and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep dive into the history of aquatics that exposes centuries-old tensions of race, gender, and power at the root of many contemporary swimming controversies. Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners—swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans’ and Native Americans’ swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim water’s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women’s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.
Download or read book The Swimmers written by Julie Otsuka and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BEST SELLER • From the best-selling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine comes a novel about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool. This searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters—and the sorrows of implacable loss—is the most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master. The swimmers are unknown to one another except through their private routines (slow lane, medium lane, fast lane) and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief. One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese American incarceration camp in which she spent the war. Alice's estranged daughter, reentering her mother's life too late, witnesses her stark and devastating decline.
Download or read book Contested Waters written by Jeff Wiltse and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.
Download or read book The Girl in the Lake written by India Hill Brown and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of Small Spaces, Doll Bones, and Mary Downing Hahn, a truly chilling (and historically inspired) ghost story from the talented author of The Forgotten Girl. Celeste knows she should be excited to spend two weeks at her grandparents' lake house with her brother, Owen, and their cousins Capri and Daisy, but she's not. Bugs, bad cell reception, and the dark waters of the lake... no thanks. On top of that, she just failed her swim test and hates being in the water—it's terrifying. But her grandparents are strong believers in their family knowing how to swim, especially having grown up during a time of segregation at public pools. And soon strange things start happening—the sound of footsteps overhead late at night. A flickering light in the attic window. And Celete's cousins start accusing her of pranking them when she's been no where near them! Things at the old house only get spookier until one evening when Celeste looks in the steamy mirror after a shower and sees her face, but twisted, different... Who is the girl in the mirror? And what does she want? Past and present mingle in this spine-tingling ghost story by award-winning author India Hill Brown.
Download or read book Total Immersion written by Terry Laughlin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swim better—and enjoy every lap—with Total Immersion, a guide to improving your swimming from an expert with more than thirty years of experience in the water. Terry Laughlin, the world’s #1 authority on swimming success, has made his unique approach even easier for anyone to master. Whether you’re an accomplished swimmer or have always found swimming to be a struggle, Total Immersion will show you that it’s mindful fluid movement—not athletic ability—that will turn you into an efficient swimmer. This new edition of the bestselling Total Immersion features: -A thoughtfully choreographed series of skill drills—practiced in the mindful spirit of yoga—that can help anyone swim more enjoyably -A holistic approach to becoming one with the water and to developing a swimming style that’s always comfortable -Simple but thorough guidance on how to improve fitness and form -A complementary land-and-water program for achieving a strong and supple body at any age Based on more than thirty years of teaching, coaching, and research, Total Immersion has dramatically improved the physical and mental experience of swimming for thousands of people of all ages and abilities.
Download or read book Waterlog written by Roger Deakin and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by John Cheever's classic short story, 'The Swimmer', Roger Deakin set out from his home in Suffolk to swim through the British Isles. The result of his journey is this personal view of an island race.
Download or read book The First Rule of Swimming written by Courtney Angela Brkic and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “exquisitely crafted” novel, a Croatian woman goes to New York to search for her missing sister—and confronts her family’s dark history (Booklist). Magdalena does not panic when she learns that her younger sister has disappeared. A free spirit, Jadranka has always been prone to mysterious absences. But when weeks pass with no word, Magdalena leaves the isolated Croatian island where their family has always lived and sets off to New York to find her sister. Her search begins to unspool the history of their family, reaching back three generations to a country torn by war. A haunting and sure-footed debut by an award-winning writer, The First Rule of Swimming explores the legacy of betrayal and loss in a place where beauty is fused inextricably with hardship, and where individuals are forced to make wrenching choices as they are swept up in the tides of history. “Suspenseful . . . well-paced.” —The New Yorker “Gracefully interweave[s] three generations of family stories and lies.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “Examines lives bruised and twisted by history, like weather-beaten trees that nevertheless manage to produce the sweetest fruit.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Pool written by JiHyeon Lee and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when two shy children meet at a very crowded pool? Dive in to find out! Deceptively simple, this masterful book tells a story of quiet moments and surprising encounters, and reminds us that friendship and imagination have no bounds.
Download or read book Haunts of the Black Masseur written by Charles Sprawson and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-08-29 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Swimming to Antarctica written by Lynne Cox and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-09-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Watermen written by Michael Loynd and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The feel-good underdog story of the first American swimmer to win Olympic gold, set against the turbulent rebirth of the modern Games, that “bring[s] to life an inspiring figure and illuminate[s] an overlooked chapter in America’s sports history” (The Wall Street Journal) “Once or twice in a decade, one of these stories . . . like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken [or] Daniel Brown’s The Boys in the Boat . . . captures the imagination of the public. . . . Add The Watermen by Michael Loynd to this illustrious list.”—Swimming World Winner of the International Swimming Hall of Fame’s Paragon Award and the Buck Dawson Authors Award In the early twentieth century, few Americans knew how to swim, and swimming as a competitive sport was almost unheard of. That is, until Charles Daniels took to the water. On the surface, young Charles had it all: high-society parents, a place at an exclusive New York City prep school, summer vacations in the Adirondacks. But the scrawny teenager suffered from extreme anxiety thanks to a sadistic father who mired the family in bankruptcy and scandal before abandoning Charles and his mother altogether. Charles’s only source of joy was swimming. But with no one to teach him, he struggled with technique—until he caught the eye of two immigrant coaches hell-bent on building a U.S. swim program that could rival the British Empire’s seventy-year domination of the sport. Interwoven with the story of Charles’s efforts to overcome his family’s disgrace is the compelling history of the struggle to establish the modern Olympics in an era when competitive sports were still in their infancy. When the powerful British Empire finally legitimized the Games by hosting the fourth Olympiad in 1908, Charles’s hard-fought rise climaxed in a gold-medal race where British judges prepared a trap to ensure the American upstart’s defeat. Set in the early days of a rapidly changing twentieth century, The Watermen—a term used at the time to describe men skilled in water sports—tells an engrossing story of grit, of the growth of a major new sport in which Americans would prevail, and of a young man’s determination to excel.
Download or read book Swimming Between Worlds written by Elaine Neil Orr and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the critically acclaimed writer of A Different Sun, a Southern coming-of-age novel that sets three very different young people against the tumultuous years of the American civil rights movement... Tacker Hart left his home in North Carolina as a local high school football hero, but returns in disgrace after being fired from a prestigious architectural assignment in West Africa. Yet the culture and people he grew to admire have left their mark on him. Adrift, he manages his father's grocery store and becomes reacquainted with a girl he barely knew growing up. Kate Monroe's parents have died, leaving her the family home and the right connections in her Southern town. But a trove of disturbing letters sends her searching for the truth behind the comfortable life she's been bequeathed. On the same morning but at different moments, Tacker and Kate encounter a young African-American, Gaines Townson, and their stories converge with his. As Winston-Salem is pulled into the tumultuous 1960s, these three Americans find themselves at the center of the civil rights struggle, coming to terms with the legacies of their pasts as they search for an ennobling future.
Download or read book Strokes of Genius written by Eric Chaline and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis written by Elaine Morgan and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do humans differ from other primates? What do those differences tell us about human evolution? Elaine Morgan gives a revolutionary hypothesis that explains our anatomic anomalies: why we walk on two legs, why we are covered in fat, why we can control our rate of breathing? The answers point to one conclusion: millions of years ago our ancestors were trapped in a semi-aquatic environment. In presenting her case Elaine Morgan forces scientists to question accepted theories of human evolution.
