Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Anyone who has gone over the crest of a roller coaster should wonder why that terror is so much fun. In Falling, Garrett Soden tells the astonishing story of how taking a fall has evolved from an experience that the ancients used as a metaphor for damnation to one so prized that today millions crave its intense rush." "Beginning with the tree-climbing lessons of our earliest ancestors, Soden takes us on a hair-raising tour through the fascinating legacy of nineteenth and twentieth-century gravity pioneers - high-divers who became folk legends; Niagara Falls tight-rope walkers who drew thousands; parachutists who challenged the "certainty" of suffocation during free-fall. It's a story filled with surprising twists and unlikely heroes, from the drunken British carousers who invented bungee jumping to the California street punks who launched skateboards skyward. With in-depth interviews of personalities such as BMX bike star Mat Hoffman and stuntwoman Nancy Thurston, Soden offers firsthand views of those who have taken falling to the absolute extreme." Soden also details the extraordinary impact falling has had on human evolution, culture, mythology, religion, and language. We learn how sixty-five million years of treetop living turned our ancestors into acrobatic prodigies, jump-starting our tool-making future with the gifts of an opposable thumb, a larger brain, and perhaps even consciousness itself. We discover why falling is a universal metaphor for failure; why some people love falling while others hate it (blame it on our genes); and what this says about our tastes in food, music, politics, religion, and sex.
SYNOPSIS
Soden brings his ability to spin a yarn to the many activities that are pursued for their extreme sensation of gravity, including bungee- jumping, going over Niagara Falls, rock climbing, mountain climbing, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, skateboarding, skydiving, surfing, and tight-roping walking. The histories of these events, stunts, and sports, the personalities that made them popular, and the circumstances of their media coverage are described in clipped, readable prose. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Soden's study of the allure falling has in Western culture is fun, informative, provocative and filled with enthusiasm. According to Soden (Hook Spin Buzz), falling became a sensation in the 18th century when the stunts of "gravity performers" offered a form of mass entertainment; since then, our preoccupation has only grown. Soden's exploration of gravity heroes and antiheroes is encyclopedic, ranging from trapeze inventor Jules L otard to the great Wallendas and skateboarding legend Tony Hawke. Similarly, Soden's consideration of gravity sports extends widely and includes mountaineering, rock climbing, 19th-century high diving, surfing, bungee jumping, ESPN's X Games and roller coasters. On the darker side, he takes time to study the "siren call" to suicide of the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of the exploits described, especially those in mountaineering and rock climbing, are awe inspiring, demanding equal parts arrogance, foolishness, daring, fortitude, physical dexterity and courage. Elsewhere, Soden devotes his attention to the psychological and cultural questions that underlie our fascination with falling. His eclectic inquiry touches on evolutionary biology, Freud, Joseph Campbell and the work of Antonio Damasio, whose analysis of emotions Soden uses to explain the attraction of falling. The author's look at the religious and linguistic implications of our conception of what it means to fall is equally inventive and insightful. By the end, Soden makes an intriguing case that the human psyche has a fundamental and complex relationship with falling, one well worth contemplating. 14 illus. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
If humans can�t fly, the next best thing is falling—at least for those so neurologically wired—and newcomer Soden entertainingly and perceptively explores it. Heights—and, by extension, falling—provide an unparalleled visceral kick, and tempting gravity goes way back in the human experience, from land divers and vine jumpers to minstrels balancing on tightened ropes high in the air. But the romantic movement, writes Soden, with its glorification of heroes and its urge to master nature, gave birth to nascent parachute jumping and other precarious challenges, amplifying the thrill. In the US, such characters as the notorious Sam Patch—who jumped from great heights into water—played to the national image of the rugged individualist confronting fear and tapped as well into the lure of financial reward. (See Paul E. Johnson�s Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, above.) Soden covers the evolution of gravity-defying sports: vertical skateboarding, biking, surfing, BASE jumping, and free soloing climbs. He is careful to put each in its social and athletic context—observing the difference, say, between Tony Hawk and Karl Wallenda—and to explain how falling is the perfect modern sport, thanks to its democracy and individuality, its immediate gratification, and, perhaps a bit cynically, it and other X-Games being "perfectly suited for the quick-cut MTV style voyeurism that has permeated popular entertainment." Rarely cynical, however, Soden is fascinated by people who commit themselves to such danger—the more so when money is not an issue—and he takes readers into the strange world of the thrill gene and the chemistry of the urge, "the constant tensionbetween primitive fear and civilized thought." From there, it�s only a step to rapture, "the radiant mojo," the flow state that provides "a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality." Beguiling. (14 illustrations)
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