Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill--A History [Hardcover]

Garrett Soden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2003 | Series: The Norton history of modern Europe

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

If you're afraid of heights, you should make sure you're firmly anchored to something before you read this book. It's all about "gravity feats," to use the author's term--an assortment of pastimes that typically require the participant to start out someplace really high and end up on terra firma, usually after free-falling or plummeting with the aid of a parachute or launching oneself into the air by means of a skateboard. But this isn't just another one of those extreme-sports books, all gung-ho and testosterone and yeee-ha! It's also a sharply observed exploration of the massive appeal of these gravity feats: what makes a seemingly ordinary person risk life and limb by bungee jumping or parachuting or walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls? Not only that, the author provides a wealth of information about the origins of the offbeat pastimes--bungee jumping, for example, grew out of "land diving," an ancient ritual performed by the natives of Pentecost Island, far off the coast of Australia. A wide-ranging and enlightening book. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393054136
• ISBN-13: 978-0393054132
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,918,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Let's Get Down, May 10, 2004

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R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill--A History (Hardcover)

It is a dream almost everyone has had: you are falling, falling... and then you wake up with a shock. There is even folklore that if you dream that you hit the ground, you die before you wake up (how could anyone tell this?). The universal falling dream is not mentioned in _Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill - A History_ (Norton) by Garrett Soden, but the book brightly examines the universality of thinking about falling, fearing it, and enjoying it. The fascination and fear of falling is so basic that it undoubtedly came to us from our arboreal ancestors. We are land animals; if we swim or take to the air, we are doing something unnatural. The time we have been on the ground and walking upright is actually much less than the time we were in the trees. We fear falling, but we get a kick out of a controlled fall, perhaps because controlled falling was necessary as we swung among the trees, and uncontrolled falling was to be avoided. We are newcomers to the flat world, but we carry with us instinctive respect for the power of gravity, and for the kicks it can give us.

It is a surprise that a history could be written about falling, but according to Soden, the real history of falling starts in the eighteenth century. Before that time, people were simply terrified of it. Even acrobats stuck basically to the ground and did not fall very far. Not only did people do their best to avoid high falls, they did not for amusement watch others risking high falls. But in the eighteenth century gravity performers became stars. Springboard leapers, mountaineers, and parachutists gave audiences thrills. Many authorities detested that the public liked such things, even though the performers insisted that they were making scientific explorations, not barbarous entertainments. The movies proved to be a fine showcase for falling stunts, and stuntmen became a new profession. Many of the gravity activities have now blossomed into the "Extreme Sports" that are popular with young people. BMX biking, skateboarding, barefoot water-ski jumping, bungee jumping, and free-solo rock climbing (without ropes) all have their adherents, and their place on television. If you lack coordination for such activities, there is always the amusement park.

Although much of this book is devoted to "not falling" or at least not getting hurt in doing so, there is also a serious review of risk-taking and what sort of people do it. Research has shown that the "death wish" hypothesized by Freud is simply not working in those who take part in such activities, although it may seem to the rest of us that they are getting excitement by courting death. There are high-sensation types and low-sensation types, but the high-sensation types don't enjoy risk any more than anyone else. For instance, they use such things as seat belts and condoms at the same rate as most people. It turns out that high-risk people who are engaged in such things as free-solo rock climbing do the simple, rational thing: they reduce risk by increasing their skill. It may well be that the neural wiring of the highs is indeed different from the lows and may be able to process lots of incoming data more efficiently. Soden goes on to show that our languages reflect the negative nature of falls, as in "falling down on the job". Icarus fell, and Lucifer fell. Yet we chase the sensation of falling, or the danger of a potential fall. Soden's surprising book gives amusing insight into the paradoxical attractiveness of rapid descent.