This is the "falling" of the book's title. But the theme of "Falling Upward" is that this fall can, in fact, touch off a personal revelation and an inner revolution. Some people find their pain ...

FALLING UPWARDS: How We Took to the Air, by Richard Holmes. Pantheon, 404 pp., $35. "Show me a balloon and I'll show you a story; quite often a tall one," Richard Holmes tells us in "Falling Upwards." ...

Franciscan priest Rohr (The Naked Now) is a big-picture kind of thinker when it comes to characterizing the human journey. Life has two halves; life follows the pattern of a hero/heroine's journey; ...