South with the Sun

July 18, 2011
As a teenager, Cox (Swimming to Antarctica) was enamored with Norwegian explorer Amundsen (1872â1928), the first to lay claim on the South Pole. Aside from chronicling Amundsen's frosty adventures, Cox details her efforts to swim in the waters off Antarctic and Greenlandâin the very icy waters where Amundsen sailed. An ambitious mélange of biography, memoir, and journalism, Cox's work covers too wide a terrain, feeling choppy and abrupt, conditions not aided by her flavorless writing and poor organization. As a memoirist, Cox fails to establish a personal connection to her aquatic quest and doesn't define her historical inspiration. As a reporter, she seems more concerned with celebrating her friendships and networking abilities than in uncovering information, an annoying tactic that will leave readers wondering who the book is really about. Overlooked and underreported, Amundsenâhe was also the first to sail through the Northwest Passageâis relegated to being the nebulous center in a book that is hopelessly adrift from the opening pages. 62 photos; 3 maps.

July 1, 2011

Record-breaking long-distance swimmer Cox (Grayson, 2008, etc.) retraces Norwegian explorer's Roald Amundsen's groundbreaking polar explorations.

Part personal memoir and part a recounting of earlier voyages of discovery, the book's release is timed to coincide with the centenary of the famous 1911 race to the South Pole when Amundsen beat the British standard-bearer Robert Scott's ill-fated party by less than a month. The author, who tested her endurance by swimming in subzero temperatures, reports her fascination with the pioneering efforts of Amundsen and his Norwegian predecessors. She sees a parallel between her own preparations to swim in extremely cold waters and their similar efforts to prepare to endure glacial conditions. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, a mentor to Amundsen, hoped to find the Northwest passage. He and his crew trained in Greenland, where they studied the survival skills of the local Inuit population. Though he failed, Amundsen followed in his footsteps and succeeded, and he intended to return to the Arctic but was thwarted by the beginning of World War I. After the war, he became involved with exploratory air flights to the North and South Poles. Cox writes about how she attempted to follow in their footsteps—swimming in Greenland's freezing waters—in order to explore "the inner and outer worlds of what a human being could achieve." She weaves together her own experiences, including a flight to the South Pole, with those of the earlier explorers, and relates interesting anecdotes about the people who helped her on her quest.

Entertaining, but readers may wish for more Amundsen and less Cox.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011

Legendary long-distance swimmer Cox reports that reading a biography of Roald Amundsen as a child fueled her dream of open-water swimming; in her best-selling Swimming to Antarctica, she saw herself following in his footsteps, so to speak. This biography is published to coincide with the centenary of Amundsen's reaching the South Pole. Most books covering Amundsen focus on his race to the pole against Robert Scott, so this full-scale approach is refreshing and should be good. With a ten-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
Renowned open-water swimmer Cox recounted her aquatic adventures in Swimming to Antarctica (2004) and Grayson (2006), and in this work, she describes additional dunkings while retelling the exploits of polar explorer Roald Amundsen. She recapitulates Amundsen's and others' standard works of polar history and pays homage to Amundsen sites in the Arctic and Antarctica. Her travels north do so in conjunction with passages about stays in Greenland and Canada's Nunavut territory that reflect the openness to novelty, interest in nature, and sensitivity to people that made her previous books so popular. When officialdom stymies her effort to fly to Antarctica, however, her writing slackens. Denied the personal participation that is the source of her authorial strength, she falls back to just recounting Amundsen's 1911 expedition to the South Pole, Richard Byrd's by airplane in 1929, and a recent aircrew's dicey flight in Antarctica; these are less lively than her writing that draws on direct experience. A bit idiosyncratic for avid readers of exploration history, Cox's voice will, however, certainly please fans of her swimming chronicles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)