Falling Upwards
Falling Upwards

Author: Richard Holmes

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-10-29

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 0307908704

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**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** **Time Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013** **The New Republic Best Books of 2013** In this heart-lifting chronicle, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell. His accounts of the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar are dramatic and exhilarating. Holmes documents as well the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher (who rose) seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology); and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work. A seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography, and the metaphysics of flights, Falling Upwards explores the interplay between technology and imagination. And through the strange allure of these great balloonists, it offers a masterly portrait of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision. (With 24 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

The Masculine Century
The Masculine Century

Author: Michael Antony

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2008-05

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0595456448

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Now that the Twentieth Century is behind us . what made it what it was? 200 million human beings killed by war, totalitarianism, and extermination programs. What made the twentieth century the most murderous age in human history, as well as the age that made the greatest advances ever in science and technology, while art and serious music declined into abstraction, non-communication, and grotesque hoaxes-blank canvases, old urinals, cans of excrement, and concertos consisting of four minutes of silence? This book argues that the century was marked by an over-masculinization of the Western mind, leading to autism and psychopathic aggression, and the eclipse of the feminine, expressive, emotional, empathetic side of human nature. Hence the unprecedented culture of total war and genocide, and the totalitarian projects to raze the human past and start again-which Modernism carried out in the arts. Hence also the masculinization of sexual behavior (as romance gave way to pornography, and marriage to promiscuity), the adoption by women of a male work role, the decline of motherhood and family, and the collapse of Western birthrates. This is all traced back to the rise of two aggressive, ultra-masculine ideologies in the nineteenth century, Darwinism and Marxism (which gave birth to Fascism and Feminism.) These ideologies put violence, conflict and aggression at the heart of life, and changed human mentalities. This book examines these developments through the literature and art of the past hundred and fifty years, and discusses their implications for the future of Western Civilization.