At the dawn of the twentieth century, a small but determined band of barrel jumpers risked their lives in one of the world’s most wondrous waterfalls. Only a few survived.

By turns a family drama and an action-adventure story, The Age of Daredevils chronicles the lives of the men and women who devoted themselves to the extraordinary sport of jumping over Niagara Falls in a barrel—a death-defying gamble that proved a powerful temptation to a hardy few.

Internationally known in the 1920s and ’30s for their barrel-jumping exploits, the Hills were a father-son team of daredevils who also rescued dozens of misguided thrill seekers and accident victims who followed them into the river. The publicity surrounding the Hills’ spectacular feats ushered in tourism, making Niagara Falls the nation’s foremost honeymoon destination, but ultimately set Red Hill Jr. on a perilous path to surpass his father’s extraordinary leaps into the void.

Like the works of Jon Krakauer and David McCullough, The Age of Daredevils explores the primal force of fear and the thirst for adventure that drive humans to the brink of death to see if they can somehow escape.

Michael Clarkson has written six psychology books, including Intelligent Fear and The Secret Life of Glenn Gould, and has won many newspaper awards for investigative stories, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for a rendezvous with reclusive author J. D. Salinger. He is considered an expert in fear, producing new research and lecturing on the subject. While working in the Niagara region, he researched many ghost stories and got the only interview with a young man thought to have caused a poltergeist incident that affected an entire shift of police officers. He lives in Fort Erie, Ontario.

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