'Nominally a history of the hot air balloon, 'Falling Upwards' is really a history of hope and fantasy - and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight' New Republic, Best Books of 2013

CHOSEN AS BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN ** Guardian ** New Statesman ** Daily Telegraph ** New Republic ** TIME Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013 ** The New Republic Best Books of 2013 ** Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)**

From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to test the air, to brave generals floating over enemy lines to watch troop movements, this wonderful book offers a seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography and the metaphysics of flight. It is a masterly portrait of human endeavour, recklessness, vision and hope.

In this heart-lifting book, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows 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.

It is not a conventional history of ballooning. In a sense it is not really about balloons at all. It is about what balloons gave rise to. It is about the spirit of discovery itself and the extraordinary human drama it produces.

From the dramatic and exhilarating 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 to 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.

About the Author

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the ten New York Times' Best Books of the Year in 2009. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Reviews

SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY:

JIM CRACE, GUARDIAN - 'A whole wide world of significance'

SARAH SANDS, NEW STATESMAN - 'Sheer delight'

MICHAEL PRODGER, EVENING STANDARD - 'Picaresque history'

DAN JONES, DAILY TELEGRAPH - 'Tremendously inventive'

LEV GROSSMAN, TIME MAGAZINE - 'Thrilling history'

CHLOE SCHAMA, NEW REPUBLIC - 'Unadulterated delight'

KIRKUS - 'Gripping'

MAIL ON SUNDAY - 'Tragic'

'A book as delightful as it is unexpected ... [an] extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment, a book that will linger and last, as it floats ever upward in the mind' Simon Winchester, Wall Street Journal

'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. He lovingly charts ... a history full of awe and inefficiency ... A truly masterly storyteller' Evening Standard

'Endlessly exhilarating ... packed full of swashbuckling stories, as well as fascinating historical accounts of the use of balloons. It is also a singularly beautiful book, wonderfully designed and illustrated and quite clearly a product of love' Mail on Sunday

'What Holmes teases out ... is that ballooning gave us, quite literally, a different point of view ... This exhilarating book, wonderfully written, generously illustrated and beautifully published, captures all that and more' Spectator

'Holmes conjures an extraordinarily vivid, violent, thrilling history, full of bizarre personalities, narrow escapes and fatal plunges. A peerless prose artist, infectiously curious' Time Magazine

Book Information
ISBN 9780007476510
Author Richard Holmes
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint William Collins
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Weight(grams) 300g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 27mm