The Free Life: The Spirit of Courage, Folly, and Obsession [Hardcover]

Anthony Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 1994

Winner of our Thirteenth Annual Editors' Book Award, The Free Life recounts an attempt by three brave, young, and obsessed people to be the first to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. The Free Life brings back the era of the sixties and recalls the determination of all explorers through history.

Anthony Smith, noted science and travel writer (The Body, Mato Grosso, The Dangerous Sort), explorer, and lighter-than-air enthusiast, asks why humans follow such improbable impulses. His own appetites for adventure—including a motorcycle trip through Africa and ballooning across the Alps—have put him at the receiving end of innumerable mishaps. He weaves his thoughts about endeavor around the doomed 1970 flight of The Free Life from East Hampton, New York—a symbol of the end of an era and of the human longing for the unknown.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Three young balloonists drowned in the North Atlantic 25 years ago, just 30 hours after their triumphant, well-publicized takeoff from a field in East Hampton, N.Y., in a balloon they called "The Free Life." Theirs was to have been the first balloon crossing in history. Two of the three, Pamela Brown and Rod Anderson, were inexperienced adventurers who sought a daring route to money, fame and thrills; the third-the pilot-was Malcolm Brighton, a well-known British balloonist intrigued by the challenge. The author (The Dangerous Sort), Brighton's friend and a balloonist himself, here tries to reconstruct what happened from fragmentary records and interviews with friends and family. It becomes clear that in their zesty determination the two amateurs ignored warnings about the balloon's faulty construction, and that Brighton evidently knew the vessel was imperfect but trusted his skills to compensate for its defects. A moving meditation on risk-taking, luck and folly. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Winner of the publisher's 13th annual Editors' Book Award, this well-written account of an ill-fated attempt in 1970 by a trio of young people to be the first to cross the Atlantic in a hot air balloon will intrigue fans of adventure stories. Smith, a noted travel and science writer (e.g., Explorers of the Amazon, Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1993), was personally acquainted with one of the balloonists and researched the lives of the other two. From the planning that started some four years earlier to the ascent of the balloon, dubbed The Free Life, Smith recounts the high-spiritedness that went into the mission and the unfortunate outcome. All signs of the trio and the balloon were lost without a trace. As an adventurer himself, Smith is able to bring a unique perspective to this story. Recommended for public library collections.
David M. Turkalo, Suffolk Univ. Law Sch. Lib., Boston
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pushcart Press (November 17, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0916366952
• ISBN-13: 978-0916366957
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,683,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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