Groundrush

by SimonJakeman (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $3.35

  Working on a building site in the city of London is not an easy way to make a living. For one thing you need to have a head for heights, but that didn't present a problem to Simon Jakeman who spent most of his spare time falling through the sky at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour with a parachute for safe landing. When, together with two friends, he leapt at dawn from an overhanging rock at the top of Cheddar Gorge - some 1,600 feet short of the safety limit for opening a parachute and five seconds to impact in the event of a malfunction - it ended disastrously for two of them. Undeterred, Jake went on t perform ever more daring leaps - in the dark from a 1,000-foot television mast and from the thirty-ninth floor of a Barbican tower block. The quest for the blissful freedom to live the present moment, the 'now of Zen philosophy, and a dangerous adrenaline addiction made it almost impossible for him to stop...Groundrush is a terrifying, often moving, sometimes funny exploration of the relationship of risk to fear - a test of Zen in action at the extreme most of us would not dare approach.