Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill--A History

This colourful history of purposeful plummeting shows how the act of taking a fall has evolved from a symbol of wickedness to the inspiration behind much of today's recreation. Beginning with the tree-climbing lessons of our earliest ancestors, Garrett Soden takes us on a hair-raising tour through the fascinating legacy of nineteenth and twentieth-century daredevils and madcaps: high-divers who became folk heroes, tightrope walkers who drew thousands and parachutists who challenged the "certainty" of suffocation during free fall. Soden draws from these stories the psychological archetype of the gravity rebel, including the drunken British carousers who invented bungee-jumping and the California street punks who launched skateboards skyward. In the end we arrive at an understanding of the appeal of today's extreme sports and thrill-seeking technology-from roller coasters to virtual reality.