Also of interest...adventures in air and space

Falling Upwards

by Richard Holmes (Pantheon, $35)

The author of 2008’s The Age of Wonder clearly had fun writing his latest, said The Economist. As he weaves together giddy firsthand accounts of early hot air ballooning adventures, it’s “hard not to discern something similarly joyous” in his own attitude. Falling Upwards might be “a touch light on the technical aspects of ballooning,” and it barely mentions the French brothers credited as the pastime’s 1783 inventors. “That, though, seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work.”

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An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

by Chris Hadfield (Little, Brown, $28)

Chris Hadfield is “pretty much a cynic’s worst nightmare,” said Nathan Whitlock in the Toronto Star. As the former astronaut tells his life story, “wholesomeness overload is never far off.” But as we watch him growing up on a family farm, braving the difficult path toward becoming the first Canadian to walk in space, and eventually recording a low-gravity YouTube music video that went viral, we can’t help liking him. Apparently, a story like his “simply can’t be made uninteresting.”

Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes (Knopf, $23)

Novelist Julian Barnes puts a portrait of early ballooning to a very different use in this “slim, stunning” volume, said Ellen Kanner in The Miami Herald. Like his breakout work, Flaubert’s Parrot, this book mixes fiction, history, and personal essay. Here, the exuberance of the early aeronauts is likened to falling in love, and that allows Barnes to convey the sense of loss he’s felt since the 2008 death of his wife. Like those early balloonists, “he has given us a perspective never seen before.”

The Aviators

by Winston Groom (National Geographic, $30)

Winston Groom’s “absorbing” 19th book returns us to an era when aviation pioneers were full-on celebrities, said Arthur Herman in The Wall Street Journal. Jimmy Doolittle was little known when the U.S. entered World War II, but he, Charles Lindbergh, and Eddie Rickenbacker all were air veterans when they leaped into the fight and contributed heroically to the Allied cause. Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, makes each man’s story riveting, but Lindbergh’s proves “the most trenchant.”