January 20
Tuesday, 7 PM

• At age 14, Cox swam 26 miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland
• At ages 15 and 16, she broke the men's and women's world records for swimming the English Channel—a 33-mile crossing in nine hours, 36 minutes.
• At 18, she swam the 20-mile Cook Strait between North and South Islands of New Zealand, was caught on a massive swell, found herself after five hours farther from the finish than when she started, and still completed the swim.
• She was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most treacherous three-mile stretch of water in the world.
• The first to swim the Bering Strait—the channel that forms the boundary line between the United States and Russia—from Alaska to Siberia, thereby opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in 48 years, swimming in 38-degree water in four-foot waves without a shark cage, wet suit, or lanolin grease.
• The first to swim the Cape of Good Hope.

In her new 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. She has a photographic memory of her swims. She tells us how she conceived of, planned, and trained for each, and recreates for us the experience of swimming (almost) unswimmable bodies of water, including her most recent astonishing one-mile swim to Antarctica in 32-degree water without a wet suit.

Cox was born in Boston, MA, and grew up in Los Alamitos, California. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Cox was named "Los Angeles Times" Woman of the Year in 1975, inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame in 2000, and honored with a lifetime achievement award from U.C. Santa Barbara. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and European Car Magazine.