America's Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation

The year 1926 was a banner one for American sports: Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney in the biggest heavyweight fight ever, Bobby Jones won his first British Open title and second U.S. Open title, and Babe Ruth made a comeback for the Yankees by smashing home runs at a prodigious rate. On August 6 that year, Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle joined this company, thrilling the world by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel. A fast swimmer, she bested the records already set by several men who had conquered the treacherous waters before her, and the U.S. festively embraced its new heroine with a ticker-tape parade on lower Broadway in New York City. America's enchantment with its young heroine soon faded, however, because the shy Ederle was uninterested in keeping up her public activities and appearances, and by the time she died in 2003 she had slipped into relative obscurity. Drawing on the massive archive of letters and newspaper articles that Ederle's niece, Mary, made available, AP sportswriter Dahlberg recreates the English Channel swim moment by moment. Dahlberg's pedantic prose and workmanlike account of Ederle's breathtaking feat, however, is as joyless as Ederle's swim was triumphant. Surprisingly, Ederle's almost forgotten feat is the subject of two other recent books, Glenn Stout's Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (Houghton Mifflin, June 2009) and Gavin Mortimer's The Great Swim (Walker, 2008). (Aug.)