The Twenty-One Balloons by William Sherman Pène du Bois

[james_davis_nicoll]

How did Professor William Waterman Sherman, late of San Francisco, end up floating in the North Atlantic on a raft composed of the wreckage of a flotilla of balloons?

The Twenty-One Balloons by William Sherman Pène du Bois

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

Cats?

[kedamono]

I remember reading this book as a kid, having checked it out of the library. Took a bit to find it again, but it's in my collection as well. I do like the reference to another balloon trip around the world by some Brit, and that the professor beat his time by a day or so.

[flemmings]

I read it as a kid, and because of a terrifying TV show about Pompeii I saw aged 6, I was traumatized by the volcano.

[(Anonymous)]

I still don’t understand why the instructor of my college science fiction course didn’t want me to use a toaster oven to test if 451*F really was the ignition point of paper.

I wasn’t going to toast the whole book during my class presentation. That would have been silly. It was just going to be an endpaper.

[(Anonymous)]

I still don’t understand why the instructor of my college science fiction course didn’t want me to use a toaster oven to test if 451*F really was the ignition point of paper.

I wasn’t going to toast the whole book during my class presentation. That would have been silly. It was just going to be an endpaper.

[naomikritzer]

I read this book as a kid (multiple times, because I owned a copy). As an adult I found out about the DeBoers diamond cartel and thought, "holy shit, the thing in The Twenty-One Balloons about diamonds was REAL????"

[chrysostom]

I was going to request this next month!

[minnehaha]

I created a whole curriculum around this book, teaching my 4th graders to use the library to find books explaining Krakatoa, volcanos, and world geography. We took turns reading "21" out loud and made vocabulary lists to look up in the dictionary. The kids loved all of it. The only way I found the book to have not aged well is the use of "Negro" at one point. So we talked about that, and what the word meant, and means, and I gave them the idea that people deserve to be called what they want to be called.

Somewhat later, I studied up on early gas supplies in ballooning, and became a little disillusioned with the original balloon's ability to stay afloat. Creating hydrogen on the spot involved trucking around iron filings and hydrochloric acid. I don't recall this in Prof. Sherman's wicker house.

K.

[roseembolism]

The main thing I remember was the terrifying hydraulic beds existing. Sure you can go up to the skylight, but on the other hand, falling out of bed would result in a multiple story fall...

[bolindbergh]

If you want cheerfully absurd, there's always Erich Kästner's The 35th of May.

[jbwoodford]

There's a scene towards the end of Nyna Qrna Sbfgre'f "Vprevttre" that I'm pretty sure is a shoutout to "The Twenty-One Balloons."

[magedragonfire]

Oh, hey, we did this one as a novel study in the sixth grade. I remember liking it and getting a brief fascination with hot-air balloons as a result.