Review of “Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air”
Because of my several months in the desert, it has been almost a year since I have had the opportunity to pilot an aircraft. Even though I have been back in the United States for a little over a month, the winter weather has precluded any flying. As a result reading about aircraft is as close as I have been able to get.
Well known British biographer Richard Holmes‘ 2013 book, Falling Upwards: How We Took to The Air provided me with the opportunity to explore a piece of aviation history that I know very little about. Nominally a history of ballooning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Holmes introduced me to some of the earliest pioneers in human flight through stories, newspaper reports, and the words of the aeronauts themselves. While I did learn a lot about the art of ballooning, I learned even more about the culture and worldviews of the late Georgian and early Victorian eras.
In many ways, that is precisely what makes Falling Upwards so incredibly readable. It is not simply a retelling of balloon history. Instead, Holmes uses ballooning as a lense through which to examine events as important as the French Revolution, the American Civil War, industrial development, and colonialism in Africa. Throughout the book the reader is struck by both the heady optimism of the enlightenment and the growth of paternalism and nationalism that would lead to the calamity of the First World War.
Over the course of week-long road trip visiting family, I listened to Blackstone Audio’s version of the book narrated by Gildart Jackson. Jackson did a superb job of drawing the listening into the text and making the book come alive. The only frustration that I experienced was Holmes’ insistence on leaving large blocks of French text untranslated. While the words of German and other nations’ aeronauts were rendered in English, entire paragraphs of French passed without even a hint of what might have been said by the original author. Perhaps Holmes was writing for a British audience who is presumably more familiar with their cross-channel neighbor, but it left this American reader a little confused.
This one disappointment notwithstanding, Falling Upwards was a delightful introduction to both an era and category of aviation that I knew very little about. Holmes brought the early history of ballooning to life for me and set the stage for the appearance of the Wright Brothers five short years after the close of this book.
