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

Smith, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0916366952 ISBN 13: 9780916366957

Publisher: Pushcart Press, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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.

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.

This intriguing account probes the doomed 1970 attempt of three individuals set on crossing the Atlantic in a balloon. An adventurer himself and friend of Malcolm Brighton, who was to be the balloon's daredevil pilot, Smith smoothly reconstructs pretrip events spanning a four-year period and depicts the circumstances that would contribute to the final lift-off of the Free Life. Were these three balloonists simply foolhardy or did the voyage have a probable chance of accomplishing its goal? In answering that question, Smith indelibly recaptures the momentum that inevitably propelled the balloon on its ill-fated journey. Alice Joyce

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushcart Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0916366952
• ISBN 13: 9780916366957
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320