Splash!
10,000 Years of Swimming
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With wit and rich detail, avid swimmer Means (67 Shots) documents the history of swimming, from Earth's first "one-cell creatures," which began life in water, through "aquatic apes," who first mastered the "rivers, deltas, and coastal waters," to today's competitive swimmers such as Michael Phelps. Means argues that to take a dip has social, political, cultural, and religious implications for the Greeks and Romans it was a celebration to be done nude, but in the Middle Ages and more Puritanical time periods, swimming was considered an abomination or a sign of witchcraft and thus forbidden. In the 20th century, Means writes, financial and racial divides have put swim lessons out of reach for many African-Americans. With painstakingly researched historical references, Means humorously imagines a Roman swimming pool the day before Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE: "a gaggle of indefatigable kids list in a noisy game of Marcus Antonius ." He intersperses his book with the musings of poets and inventors such as Lord Byron and Ben Franklin, along with anecdotes of athletes such as Annette Kellerman, a turn-of-the-20th-century Australian competitive swimmer. Means's delightful history of humans in water simultaneously educates and entertains.
