“An exploration of the cultural and political meaning of floating and levitating in the air, Levitation is an extraordinary book. Ranging across philosophy, theology, popular culture, and science, the book is a sublime revelation of how the air, and what floats in it and on it, have shaped human societies. A mesmerizing and beautifully illustrated book.”
— Stephen Graham, Newcastle University
"Buddha’s vertical takeoff does not appear in Adey’s Levitation, but scores of other elevations do. Adey’s book is exhilaratingly wide-ranging and it is crammed with the sorts of beguiling oddities that would have made Buddha tut in disapproval."
— Literary Review
“Wonderfully digressive. . . . Brilliant. . . . A phantasmagorical cultural history. . . . As sly and strange as its subject, Adey’s book is an ambiguous, allusive, and fascinating manual of unassisted flight, and I only wish I’d had it to hand when I was a ten-year-old would-be levitator.”
— Philip Hoare, New Statesman
"This wide-ranging and well illustrated study is not so much about incidents of levitation as about the ideas of floating, rising up, and moving through the air, drawing examples from philosophy, religion, magic, science and popular culture. Adey writes engagingly as he reveals the remarkable depth and extent of these ideas, how they have become embedded in human society, and how they have manifested or been expressed. . . . From the power of ascetic saints and surrealist art to flying superheroes and astronauts in null-gravity, through today’s CGI tricks with camera or computer, and even further into the future with hovering cities, Adey keeps you thinking."
— Fortean TImes
"Adey’s aerial archive is vast; his insights, compelling. . . . Full of delightful discoveries. . . . Levitation is something all too often missing from academic publishing: a sourcebook for the imagination itself."
— Critical Inquiry