71% of the Earth’s surface is water. Human adults are 60% water. The relationship of humankind to water is one that is so present it may seem obvious to contemplate. In her new book “Why We Swim,” Bonnie Tsui examines one of the centerpieces of this relationship: swimming. Tsui covers everything from swimming in the Arctic for political change to swimming in the Olympics. Her thorough research and evident determination to understand swimming comes across on every page, keeping readers fascinated by something that is all around us, yet rarely examined.
Tsui begins with the extreme — swimming to survive. She tells the story of “a boat in the North Atlantic and a man who should have drowned.” When a fishing boat capsized on the night of March 11, 1984, two sailors were immediately lost to the sea, but Guðlaugur Friðþórsson and two others started swimming toward the shore. After about 10 minutes, only Friðþórsson was still swimming. He swam over five hours in water below 45 degrees Fahrenheit and covered over three and a half miles before a lighthouse guided him to shore. Tsui writes that “When he arrived at the hospital, doctors were unable to discern his pulse.” It turns out this Icelandic fisherman, who is still alive, has a sort of “biological quirk”: his body is insulated by a layer of fat that is two or three times the human norm.
This is not only a dramatic and harrowing story, but it serves as a powerful anecdote upon which Tsui predicates her curiosity towards swimming. Tsui wonders why some humans are able to accomplish such feats in the water. “We are land creatures with an aquatic past,” she writes, before presenting the book’s guiding question: Why do humans swim despite being evolutionarily much better suited to moving on solid ground? Tsui’s deep fascination with why humans are drawn to the water is as clear as the Mediterranean Sea before the first chapter even starts.
A book about different kinds of swimming may seem mundane, but Tsui’s is not. As Tsui dives deeper into myriad situations in which humans flow through water, her dedication to this topic becomes more and more compelling.
“Why We Swim” lends insights into the swimming practices of several noteworthy individuals. Readers learn about the rehabilitation routines of marathon swimmers, Ben Franklin’s daily skinny-dipping, the pools Saddam Hussein had at each of his houses and how samurai used to swim in seventeenth-century Japan. The chapters dedicated to these miscellaneous phenomena are not only informative about niche subject matter, but Tsui also integrates them into the broader currents of the book seamlessly.
Tsui also writes of more intense subject matter. The segregation of public pools, the exclusivity of competitive swimming and the contemporary issue of pools as status symbols are all mentioned in “Why We Swim.” Tsui displays her impressive ability to write about every imaginable subcategory of the relevance of swimming throughout the book. It is a master-class in how to make something specific relevant to everyone who happens to pick it up. As Tsui concludes, “Not everybody is a swimmer, but everyone has a swimming story to tell.” In “Why We Swim,” Tsui tells us a countless number of those stories, which readers won’t be forgetting any time soon.
