"Swimming is a long thread that connects the Olympic heroes of today with the real and mythic ones of the past across more than ten millennia--a recorded history that begins in a cave in the Egyptian desert and sweeps across athletes and poets, statesmen and emperors, humans and gods; across the whole human experience, the entire human story. Splash! weaves a 10,000-year-old tale that begins in a bone-dry cave in the remote southwest corner of Egypt,...

The inspirational story of a group of impoverished children who were transformed into champion swimmers. In 1937 an ordinary grammar school teacher on the island of Maui took a group of underprivileged children mostly of Japanese ancestry and, in three short years, transformed them into Olympic champions.

"In the early twentieth century, few Americans knew how to swim, and as a competitive sport, it was almost unheard of. That is, until Charles Daniels took to the water. On the surface, young Charles had it all: high-society parents, a place at an exclusive New York City prep school, summer vacations in the Adirondacks. But the scrawny teenager suffered from extreme anxiety and a sadistic father who mired the family in bankruptcy and scandal before...