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Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers
Wingsuits and the Pioneers Who Flew in Them, Fell in Them, and Perfected Them
1 of 1 copy available
Or so you might think after reading this account of their unsung but even more daring rivals—the men and women who strapped wings to their backs and took to the sky. If only for a few seconds.
People have been dying to fly, quite literally, since the dawn of history. They’ve made wings of feather and bone, leather and wood, canvas and taffeta, and thrown themselves off the highest places they could find. Theirs is the world’s first and still most dangerous extreme sport, and its full history has never been told.
Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers is a thrilling, hilarious, and often touching chronicle of these obsessive inventors and eccentric daredevils. It traces the story of winged flight from its doomed early pioneers to their glorious high-tech descendants, who’ve at last conquered gravity (sometimes, anyway). Michael Abrams gives us a brilliant bird’s-eye view of what it’s like to fly with wings. And then, inevitably, to fall.
In the Immortal Words of Great Birdmen...
“Someday I think that everyone will have wings and be able to soar from the housetops. But there must be a lot more experimenting before that can happen.” —Clem Sohn, the world’s first batman, who plummeted to his death at the Paris Air Show in 1937
“The trouble was that he went only halfway up the radio tower. If he had gone clear to the top it would have been different.” —Amadeo Catao Lopes in 1946, explaining the broken legs of the man who tried his wings
“One day, a jump will be the last. The jump of death. But that idea does not hold me back.” —Rudolf Richard Boehlen, who died of jump-related injuries in 1953
“It turned out that almost everyone from the thirties and forties had died. That just made me want to do it more.” —Garth Taggart, stunt jumper for The Gypsy Moths, filmed in 1968
“You have to be the first one. The second one is the first loser.” —Felix Baumgartner, who in 2003 became the first birdman to cross the English Channel
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
December 18, 2007 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307419903
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307419903
- File size: 4346 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 10, 2006
When Abrams talks about humans flying, he is referring more to Icarus than to airplanes. From ancient myths through China "sometime in the sixth century A.D." to present-day skydivers, Abrams chronicles the men and their various models of wings that have taken to the air in hope of flying like a bird. The tales of flight range from the silly and mysterious to the inspiring and unbelievable. Abrams's brief biographies are deep enough to convey how serious these birdmen take the notion of flight, but lighthearted enough to capture the carefree way most of these sky flyers face possible death. For instance, Abrams isn't afraid to paraphrase Shakespeare in describing one would-be flyer who also happened to be an English king thus: "the wind did not crack its cheeks quite enough to keep the sovereign aloft—'twas his neck that cracked instead." Abrams's witty touch is a saving grace considering that many of these daredevils' stories follow a similar arc: as Abrams notes, an exceptionally high percentage of successful and would-be birdmen are, for some unexplained reason, either orphans or from the state of Michigan. B&w photos. -
May 1, 2006
An entertaining sidebar to the history of aviation is the story of attempts to fly, glide, or at least fall slowly with the aid of strap-on lifting surfaces--a tale that begins in ancient China and continued in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The resultant contraptions often resembled bird or bat wings, and a good many of them can be mistaken for the Caped Crusader's distinctive gear. The foes of these experimental contrivances were not, however, criminals a la Gotham City but the laws of aerodynamics, which dictated that these designs just could not produce enough lift for the performance desired of them. The chatty tone of Abrams' sketches of important figures in his chronicle may strike some as in poor taste, considering the number of the subjects who came to fatal ends. The rigid-wing glider, mated to controllable surfaces and the internal-combustion engine, finally opened the skies. Yet once the fixed-wing aircraft was ready, thanks to these experimenters, so was the parachute.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)
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