Overview

In beauty, brains and brawn, the three balloonists were perfectly cast for the adventure. Pamela Brown and Rod Anderson were a visionary American couple who conceived of and nurtured the daring flight. Malcolm Brighton, their pilot, was a blond Englishman with a pioneer dash and swagger. The flight of The Free Life would be his 100th assent. The late Anthony Smith asks why humans follow such improbable impulses. His own appetites for adventure ? including a motorcycle trip through Africa and ballooning across the Alps ? put him at the receiving end of innumerable mishaps. He weaves his thoughts about human 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.

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9780960097739

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Published for the first time in a paperback edition , this classic balloon adventure - winner of Pushcart's 13th Editors' Book Award - is a moving meditation on risk-taking, luck and folly. -- Publishers Weekly

Published for the first time in a paperback edition, this classic balloon adventure - winner of Pushcart's 13th Editors' Book Award - is a moving meditation on risk-taking, luck and folly.

Author Information

Anthony Smith was a broadcaster, nature explorer, avid balloonist, science and travel writer (The Body, Mato Grosso, The Dangerous Sort, among his twenty-five books). One of his last adventures was successfully piloting a raft across the Atlantic when he was 85 years old. He died in 2014.

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