**Time Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013**
**The New Republic Best Books of 2013**
In this heart-lifting chronicle, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell.
His accounts of the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar are dramatic and exhilarating. Holmes documents as well the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher (who rose) seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology); and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work.
A seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography, and the metaphysics of flights, Falling Upwards explores the interplay between technology and imagination. And through the strange allure of these great balloonists, it offers a masterly portrait of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision.
(With 24 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
**Time Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013**
**The New Republic Best Books of 2013**
In this heart-lifting chronicle, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell.
His accounts of the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar are dramatic and exhilarating. Holmes documents as well the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher (who rose) seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology); and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work.
A seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography, and the metaphysics of flights, Falling Upwards explores the interplay between technology and imagination. And through the strange allure of these great balloonists, it offers a masterly portrait of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision.
(With 24 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Reviews-
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August 26, 2013
Mesmerized by the dash and eccentricity of many who have flown balloons since the first Montgolfiers of 1783, Holmes (The Age of Wonder) communicates the perilous delight of ballooning through tales of scientific feats and derring-do. Fearless, reckless French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard delighted both Napoleon and restored Bourbon King Louis XVIII as she released nighttime aerial firework displays and executed complicated acrobatics while standing, exposed, in a tiny silver gondola. (In 1819, thousands watched horrified as Blanchard, aged 41, crashed to her death in a fiery descent from the Paris sky.) Although New Hampshirite Thaddeus Lowe’s dreams of transatlantic balloon flight were cut short by the Civil War, he persuaded Lincoln that a balloon could carry telegraph equipment and send direct aerial observations to a commander on the ground; and “one of Lowe’s most brilliant observational coups” was the discovery of the Confederates’ May 1862 secret evacuation of Yorktown under cover of darkness. British meteorologist James Glaisher (1809–1903) attempted to determine how high a man could fly before he was “asphyxiated, frozen, burnt or even electrocuted by static electricity in high clouds.” An unconventional history of ballooning, this quirky, endearing, and enticing collection melds the spirit of discovery with chemistry, physics, engineering, and the imagination. Illus. -
Starred review from July 15, 2013
The biographer of two great Romantics (Shelley and Coleridge) relates yet another romantic tale--the story of the human passion to fly up, up and away in a beautiful balloon. Holmes (The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, 2009, etc.) begins with a memory--a flying dream from childhood--mentions Daedalus and Icarus, some balloons in literature, films and popular culture, and then lifts off into another of his delightfully soaring histories. He notes that the French were the first to use balloons for military purposes (reconnaissance), then tells us about some of the most notable balloon pioneers, including Andre-Jacques Garnerin, who also pioneered parachutes. Holmes focuses on the accomplishments (and failures) of a number of other principals, including Charles Green (many of his flights lifted off from Vauxhall Gardens), Henry Mayhew, Eugene Godard, John Wise, James Glaisher, Camille Flammarion, Gaston Tissandier and Salomon Andree, whose attempt to reach the North Pole in 1897 ended in death for all aboard his vessel. Holmes reminds us of ballooning in the fictions of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Mark Twain (whose Tom Sawyer Abroad reunited the Huck-Jim-Tom trio for a flight across the Atlantic) and others. He tells, as well, about spectacular failures--crashes, fatal and otherwise. His two most gripping segments are the airlift from Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871)--dozens of flights took mail and other dispatches out of the city during the siege--and the assault on the North Pole. One great irony regarding the latter: The aeronauts, on the ground after the balloon could no longer fly, shot and ate polar bears; later, the bears ate them. Meticulous history illuminated and animated by personal passion, carried aloft by volant prose.COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 15, 2013
Ballooning attracts romantics who believe the experience of floating is worth the risk of death and injury. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, it also drew dreamers who believed ballooning was the key to advancing transportation, scientific exploration, and military surveillance. Why bounce along in a horse-drawn coach when you could glide quickly through the air to your destination? Optimists foresaw great profits for anyone who could develop dependable balloons that could be steered to appointed cities, delivering people, goods, and messages. Ambitious scientists rose above the clouds to test the qualities of air, while brave generals floated over enemy lines to watch troop movements. In the style of his The Age of Wonder (2010), Holmes, fellow of the British Academy, recounts adventurous stories of balloon pioneers in France, Britain, and the U.S., who built and tested airships, gloriously setting records for speed, distance, and height, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. Filled with period drawings and early photographs, this entertaining history will be popular with history readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.) -
May 15, 2013
Ballooning was among the numerous bold scientific adventures outlined in Holmes's multi-award-wining best seller, The Age of Wonder. Here Holmes details its history and consequences, starting in the late 1700s and proceeding to the seven mile-high flights of James Glaisher, FRS, which launched the new science of meteorology.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from September 1, 2013
The balloon's pivotal role as the first form of flying technology has often been overlooked. Holmes (biographical studies, Univ. of East Anglia), the formerly self-described "romantic biographer" (e.g., Coleridge) who moved to the history of science with his previous book The Age of Wonder has brought romance to technological discovery in his latest work. The balloon, which played a minor role in The Age of Wonder, soars to new heights as the sole subject here. The author's own love of aerostats and aerostation (Holmes's favorite word for "ballooning") shines through in the buoyancy of his text. His daring and dramatic stories of the history of balloon bravado, even when tragic, catch the spirit of wonder that these "hanging observation basket[s]" brought to 19th-century scientific dreamers, from Edgar Allan Poe to French photographer Nadar to English meteorologist James Glaisher. The balloon provided an aerial platform for spectacular acrobatic stunts, as well as for the first aerial photograph of Paris. Holmes also shows how, in addition to playing a vital role in two major wars, balloons have flown across the Atlantic and even sought to reach (unsuccessfully) the North Pole. VERDICT This title will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in flighty expeditionary history, and it's likely to fly off many library shelves. [See Prepub Alert, 4/15/13.]--Lara Jacobs, Brooklyn
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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September 1, 2013
The balloon's pivotal role as the first form of flying technology has often been overlooked. Holmes (biographical studies, Univ. of East Anglia), the formerly self-described "romantic biographer" (e.g., Coleridge) who moved to the history of science with his previous book The Age of Wonder has brought romance to technological discovery in his latest work. The balloon, which played a minor role in The Age of Wonder, soars to new heights as the sole subject here. The author's own love of aerostats and aerostation (Holmes's favorite word for "ballooning") shines through in the buoyancy of his text. His daring and dramatic stories of the history of balloon bravado, even when tragic, catch the spirit of wonder that these "hanging observation basket[s]" brought to 19th-century scientific dreamers, from Edgar Allan Poe to French photographer Nadar to English meteorologist James Glaisher. The balloon provided an aerial platform for spectacular acrobatic stunts, as well as for the first aerial photograph of Paris. Holmes also shows how, in addition to playing a vital role in two major wars, balloons have flown across the Atlantic and even sought to reach (unsuccessfully) the North Pole. VERDICT This title will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in flighty expeditionary history, and it's likely to fly off many library shelves. [See Prepub Alert, 4/15/13.]--Lara Jacobs, Brooklyn
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- Rachel Syme, The New Yorker "Holmes has written a book that is as compulsively digestible as the Internet, and yet it is rounder and warmer, and packed with more facts and obscure stories than you would learn if you combed the Web for months. Holmes's writing is a carnival of historical delights; at every turn there is a surprise, all adding up to a whole.... 'Falling Upwards' sneaks the trajectory of mankind into under three hundred and fifty pages, which you can read in short dashes. You may not notice it at the time, but what he is doing is changing the game."
- Chloe Schama, The New Republic, Best Books of 2013 "...the book that gave me the most unadulterated delight this year was nonfiction, Richard Holmes's Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. The book is nominally a history of the hot air balloon, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a history of hope and fantasy--and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight."
- Time Magazine, Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the 2013 "Out of an ostensibly placid, dreamy activity, hot air ballooning, Holmes conjures an extraordinarily vivid, violent, thrilling history, full of bizarre personalities, narrow escapes and fatal plunges. A peerless prose artist, infectiously curious, Holmes revives such forgotten heroes as Sophie Blanchard, Napoleon's official aeronaut, and James Glaisher, who in 1862 rode a balloon to 29,000 feet without oxygen in the name of science, and Thaddeus Lowe, who flew over Civil War battlefields, doing aerial reconnaissance for the Union"
- Simon Winchester, The Wall Street Journal "A book as delightful as it is unexpected, one that is a testament to the sheer pleasures of writing about what you know, about what excites you and what gives you joy. And what more joyous a topic than the hilarious insanities of 'Falling upwards'!.... Richard Holmes's extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment, a book that will linger and last, as it floats ever upward in the mind."
- Paul Elie, The New York Times Book Review "No writer alive and working in English today writes better about the past than Holmes....The stories themselves are remarkable."
- Mark Gamin, Cleveland Plain Dealer "Throughout his book, Holmes' love for the balloon (a 'mixture of power and fragility in constant flux' is his description for it) is obvious. It's a fine addition to his already extraordinary oeuvre."
- Braenna Draxler, Discover "British biographer Holmes' passion for the topic comes through in this rich and often entertaining chronicle of intrepid vertical explorers who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives lifting human flight out of the realm of mythology and into the air."
- Tom Beer, Newsday "Holmes is a charming and impassioned guide...his prose often reaches a moving pitch."
- Publishers Weekly "An unconventional history of ballooning, this quirky, endearing, and enticing collection melds the spirit of discovery with chemistry, physics, engineering, and the imagination."
- Kirkus "Gripping...Meticulous history illuminated and animated by personal passion, carried aloft by volant prose."
- London Evening Standard "In the same month that Julian Barnes published Levels of Life, with its melancholy meditations on balloon flight, Richard Holmes presents a full-blown, lyrical history of the same subject, investigating the strangeness, detachment and powerful romance of 'falling upwards' into a seemingly alien and uninhabitable element. Holmes lovingly charts a course from the Montgolfier brothers' first hydrogen-fuelled flights in the 1780s to the use of balloons by fugitive East Germans in the 1970s and the latest forays by polar explorer David Hempleman-Adams, a history full of awe and inefficiency...Holmes is a truly masterly storyteller ."
- Library Journal "Ballooning was among the numerous bold scientific adventures outlined in Holmes's multi-award-winning best seller, The Age of Wonder. Here Holmes details its history and consequences, starting in the late 1700s and proceeding to the seven-mile-high flights of James Glaisher, FRS, which launched the new science of meteorology."
- Toby Lester, American Scholar Review "Full of surprises....a book to seek out."
- Lily Ford, TLS "The human drama...is marvelously handled. Holmes is an astute biographer, and has already shown with The Age of Wonder...that he ca
