Great Article on Open Water Swimming!

Hi Jennifer, Outside magazine a few months ago had an article on swimming across the Mississippi on its online site. And on my to-read list is Akiko Busch's Nine Ways to Cross a River: Midstream Reflections on Getting There from Here. She does indeed swim across a variety of rivers! Regards, VB

On Nine Ways to Cross a River: The navel-gazing and quotations I can do without. I'm interested in a) the logistics and b) trips reports from under the surface, things she saw. But I have not in fact read it, merely glanced thru it, which says something in itself. :wave: Now that I've read two chapters, I miss the sweep, the diving into the subject, the narrative strength of a John McPhee. The author's personal story is just not that compelling. Many opportunities to really write she seems to turn away from. Her accidental meeting with Pete Seeger, folk musician and hero of the Hudson, should have burned an image of him in my mind. It didn't. She quotes from Edward Abbey, Alan Moorehead - from quite a few people in fact - with the result that it's beginning to feel like burnished college journalism rather than A Book. VB

Hey Vive, I started reading Cross a River last December on vacation. Parts of it were OK, other parts left me ... wanting. :yawn: I'll be interested to see what you think. JIM

New book! This one is grand: Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Matter, by Joseph Mazur (it was a finalist for a 2005 PEN award in nonfiction). Logic, reason, and the plausible (probability), through wonderful vignettes of the author's life: "Jeremy was only ten when he dived from his father's yacht off the coast of Pine Cay, a private island north of the Dominican Republic owned and managed by his father's exclusive Meridian Club. He snorkeled through the shallow warm, crystal-clear waters to take underwater videos of schools of yellow angelfish and spectacular coral, unaware of the blue shark furtively swimming behind him. A brave fisherman who happened to be nearby rescued him, but not in time to prevent severe injury...." Jeremy shows up in the author's calculus class many years later, devoted to his Texas Instruments calculator and blissfully unaccepting of irrational numbers. He becomes, for the author, a figural introduction to Zeno's paradox: the swift-footed Achilles, for so he was known, could not win a race with a tortoise if the tortoise were given a head start. Can't put it down. "The probable is that which for the most part happens." --Aristotle :) VB