Overview

Every year, approximately 236,000 people drown. Many of them did not have to. In the middle of the twentieth century, a swimming coach at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered something that should have changed everything. He discovered that the human body, given the right instruction, can survive in open water for hours without swimming a single stroke. His name was Fred Lanoue. His technique was called drownproofing. And the story of what happened to it is one of the most remarkable and troubling episodes in the history of public health. This book traces the full arc of this extraordinary story. It begins in the ancient world, where humanity's oldest fear was born at the water's edge, and moves through the naval disasters of two world wars, the Cold War military programs that adopted Lanoue's technique at scale, the international spread of drownproofing across allied nations, and the institutional forces that quietly dismantled a proven survival program not because it failed, but because the institutions responsible for it found it easier to abandon than to defend. This is narrative history at its most compelling. Drawing on military archives, declassified documents, firsthand accounts from veterans and students, and the physiological research that has since confirmed everything Lanoue understood from practical observation alone, this book tells a story that spans eight decades and crosses continents. It is the story of a man with a conviction, an institution that tested it, a military that adopted it, and a culture that walked away from it. It is also, ultimately, a story about what we do with knowledge that could save lives, and what it costs when we do not do enough. For anyone who has ever stood at the water's edge and wondered what they would do if everything went wrong. This book is an essential reading for students of military history, public health, and the history of ideas. It is also simply a great story, told with the care and precision that its subject deserves.

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