Excerpt
A skydive is a departure from an aircraft in flight, for the purpose of recreation or competition, while using a parachute for all or part of the subsequent descent. A skydiver skydives. But the story doesn't end here. Who skydives, how the life cycle of a skydive develops, and why one would want to skydive are all legitimate questions.

Some approaches to skydiving have proven to work better than others and have had a long term effect on the who, what, where, how and why human beings leave the familiarity of an airplane for the bareness of the earth's atmosphere. The goal of this book is to explain some of these approaches, ideas, and the cultural forces driving the practical exercises learned in formal parachute training.