Falling

Brion Toss

C-Star Press

£4.71 (Kindle)

Brion Toss is a master rigger, based in Port Townsend and currently celebrating forty years in the trade. Or is it a vocation? This very short book is a meditation on falling; falling objects, averted or interrupted falls, falls that do not end in death. Falls from which we can learn. Most, but not all, of the dramas are played out on the topmasts and yards of tall ships and among the incidental pleasures of the book is the language of royals, parrels and topgallants. Toss has a wry writing style and a gift for apt literary reference, gleaned perhaps from the reading he did during a long period of ‘unlikely survival’ early in his career. A wise and thought-provoking consideration of human’s relationship with risk.