Readers who enjoy comprehensive biographies and autobiographies won't find Swimming to Antarctica to their liking. Lynne Cox largely avoids emotions, trivia, sentimentality and similar extraneous materials to deliver a very tightly focused account of her remarkable accomplishments in cold-water ocean swimming. She easily could have gone into accounts of her personal life and fundraising activities, just to name a couple of topics, but elects instead to concentrate on her swims - and that focus, in my view, elevates this book ahead of most contemporary autobiographies. As for the accounts of the swims, suffice to say that I found them gripping even though it's the sort of activity in which I otherwise have little interest. Surely that alone is a strong sign of a well-written book.