Customer Reviews

Between Heaven and Earth: An Adventure in Free Fall

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Doug Garr captures the progressive technologies, lifestyle, trends and historical moments in the controversial sport of skydiving.

He has been there for the early groundbreaking moments and has met and even jumped with many of the pioneers of the sport.

Having started on vintage round parachutes, and finishing on cutting edge gear, Garr has spent hours falling through the sky, and many more with numerous interesting characters that any reader would love to meet.

This inspirational, entertaining and exciting re-memory of the early, yet relatively recent years of skydiving will surely excite its readers as they also learn from the valuable first-hand experiences of Doug Garr.

Skydiving literature has been pretty much confined to James Drought's 1955 novel, THE GYPSY MOTHS. Doug Garr's skydiving memoir, BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH, is (finally) a worthy successor. Garr started jumping in 1969, when the sport was barely out of its infancy and into its toddlerhood. He made his last (or -- who knows? -- perhaps just most recent) jump in 2008, at age 60. In between, he's met most of the legends and legendary reprobates of one of the extreme-est of extreme sports.
It's hard to convey the allure of launching yourself out the side of an airplane into cold mid-air, but Garr does a masterful job. He captures the jargon and describes the gear and the techniques without ever becoming overly technical or incomprehensible. He writes a down-to-earth (ouch!) prose, leavened by the sort of mordant, deadpan humor that's common among skydivers. Even the most routine parachute jump has an element of what Garr calls "the pucker factor." As you'd expect, skydiving (especially in its early days) has attracted its share of characters, and you don't have to read very far before you recognize the author as one of them.
BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH is like a personal conversation with Doug Garr about the sport he knows and loves. Skydivers will eat this one up for its nostalgia value and its portraits of such skydiving immortals as Owen Quinn and Bill "Smitty" Smith. The merely curious -- even the only VAGUELY curious -- will find themselves wondering, "You know, maybe just once, I wonder if I ...."

You can become addicted to anything if you let yourself. "Between Heaven and Earth: An Adventure in Free Fall" is a memoir focusing on what few people have the courage to do - leap out of a plane tens of thousands of feet in the air. Analyzing why people would be over-the-top crazy enough to do this, why it's fun, and why the reader should possibly give it a shot, author Doug Garr takes readers deep into the mind of skydiving and gives them much to think about. "Between Heaven and Earth" is an exciting dive into the world of sky diving - recommended.