Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Nowâs a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weâll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayGift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingFalling Upwards
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weâre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreFalling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its subject.
Dramatic sequences move from the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the revelatory ascents over the great Victorian cities and sprawling industrial towns of northern Europe, the astonishing long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise, and the French photographer FâÂŽlix Nadar to the terrifying high-altitude flights of James Glaisher, FRS, who rose above seven miles without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology as well as the environmental notionâso important to us todayâof a "fragile" planet. Balloons were also used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the American Civil War, including a memorable flight by General Custer.
Readers will discover the many writers and dreamersâfrom Mary Shelley to Edgar Allan Poe, from Charles Dickens to Jules Verneâwho felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work. Moreover, through the strange allure of the great balloonists, Holmes offers another of his subtle portraits of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision.
Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992. His first book, âShelley: The Pursuitâ, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. âColeridge: Early Visionsâ won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and âDr Johnson & Mr Savageâ won the James Tait Black Prize. âColeridge: Darker Reflectionsâ won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, âFootsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographerâ in 1985, and âSidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographerâ in 2000.
Gildart Jacksonâs acting credits span the stage and screen. He is most often recognized for his roles as Gideon on Charmed and Simon Prentiss on General Hospital. He has also starred in numerous television shows, including CSI and Vegas, and he played the lead in the highly acclaimed independent feature film You, directed by his wife, Melora Hardin.
Reviews
âHolmes is a distinguished biographer with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around themâŚThe aeronauts of the heroic age âŚseem glamorous and admirable in their pursuit of knowledge, fame, fortune, military superiority, and sheer excitement.â
âA 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 âFalling Upwardsâ!âŚRichard Holmesâ extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment, a book that will linger and last, as it floats ever upward in the mind.â
âHolmes 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. Holmesâ writing is a carnival of historical delights; at every turn there is a surprise, all adding up to a wholeâŚFalling 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.â
âNo writer alive and working in English today writes better about the past than HolmesâŚThe stories themselves are remarkable.â
âHolmes is a charming and impassioned guideâŚhis prose often reaches a moving pitch.â
âEndlessly exhilaratingâŚFalling Upwards is packed full of swashbuckling stories, as well as fascinating historical accounts of the use of balloons.â
âIt is a tragic tale, punctuated with ghastly accidents, but thanks to Holmesâ enthusiasm and eager curiosity it remains valiantly airborne.â
âThe book that gave me the most unadulterated delight this year was nonfiction, Richard Holmesâ 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 fantasyâand the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight.â
â[A] captivating and surely definitive history of the madness of pre-Wright brothers ballooning.â
âHis enthusiasm is one of the bookâs many pleasuresâŚIt is hard not to discern something similarly joyous in this second-hand account [of ballooning narratives]âŚA spirited work.â
âIn 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 âfalling upwardsâ into a seemingly alien and uninhabitable element. Holmes lovingly charts a course from the Montgolfier brothersâ 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 inefficiencyâŚHolmes is a truly masterly storyteller .â
â[Richard Holmesâ] wonderful history of the early years of ballooning.â
â[In] this charming, witty, and insightful account of windblown ideas and adventures, Holmes succeeds neatly in matching his form to his subject.â
âEnthralling, picaresque historyâŚHolmes cuts his thrilling set-pieces with haunting imagesâŚAppropriately his prose is lighter than air, elegantly traversing aviators and eras. It means that as his balloonists embark on journeys full of danger and wonder the reader is suspended in the basket alongside them.â
âFar from being a straightforward history of the balloon, this is an uplifting celebration of its aesthetic appeal and its âsocial and imaginative impact,â of the writing it inspired and of the âstrangely mesmerizingâ âdash and eccentricityâ of the balloonists themselvesâŚThe tone of the narrative is admiring, amused, and elegiacâŚIn its own nostalgic but analytical fashion, Falling Upwards generates the same willing credulity that Holmes enjoys in the balloonists he admires: âIndeed, I find it difficult not to fall for them.ââ
â[Holmes] has a rare and infectious capacity for wondermentâŚdazzlingâŚI felt I was flyingâwith the sensations of hilarity, ecstasy, and terror that are rightly provoked by our escape from gravityâŚwhile I was reading Holmesâ heady, swoopingly aerodynamic book.â
âThis is a book in which the delight the author clearly took in researching and writing it carries over to the readerâŚpuckish is its pleasure in its details and in its gusts of digressionâŚHe has a lovely wit and ease of addressâŚAbove all what Holmes teases outâŚis the very interesting idea that ballooning gave us, quite literally, a different point of viewâŚIt offers a wholly novel experience of sublimityâŚThis exhilarating book, wonderfully written, generously illustrated and beautifully published, captures all that and more.â
âI hopped aboard for his beguiling story of how we, physically and imaginatively, first took to the air. You should too.â
âBeautifully written and lovingly researched.â
âThe authorâs own love of aerostats and aerostation (Holmesâs favorite word for âballooningâ) shines through in the buoyancy of his textâŚThis title will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in flighty expeditionary history, and itâs likely to fly off many library shelves.â
âGrippingâŚMeticulous history illuminated and animated by personal passion, carried aloft by volant prose.â
âAn unconventional history of ballooning, this quirky, endearing, and enticing collection melds the spirit of discovery with chemistry, physics, engineering, and the imagination.â
âIn the style of his The Age of Wonder, Holmes, fellow of the British Academy, recounts adventurous stories of balloon pioneers in France, Britain, and the United States, 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.â
âFew people realize the impact of lighter-than-air flight on meteorology, military strategy, postal delivery, and, of course, air and space travel. Gildart Jackson captures all the historic significance of Holmesâ work, which provides a detailed account of the early years of manned flightâfrom prehistoric Peru through the nineteenth century. Jackson conveys his clear respect for the subject matter. He slowly but accurately pronounces the many French names and phrases, and offers historical quotes without characterizationâŚThis is a gripping history, professionally performed.â
Expand reviews