Strange Angel
eBook - ePub

Strange Angel

The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

  1. 368 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Strange Angel

The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

About this book

Now a CBS All Access series: "A riveting tale of rocketry, the occult, and boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles" ( Booklist).
The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city's occult scene.
 
Fueled by childhood dreams of space flight, Parsons was a leader of the motley band of enthusiastic young men who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a cornerstone of the American space program. But Parsons's wild imagination also led him into a world of incantations and orgiastic rituals—if he could make rocketry a reality, why not black magic?
 
George Pendle re-creates the world of John Parsons in this dazzling portrait of prewar superstition, cold war paranoia, and futuristic possibility. Peopled with such formidable real-life figures as Howard Hughes, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert Heinlein, Strange Angel explores the unruly consequences of genius.
The basis for a new miniseries created by Mark Heyman and produced by Ridley Scott, this biography "vividly tells the story of a mysterious and forgotten man who embodied the contradictions of his time . . . when science fiction crashed into science fact. . . . [It] would make a compelling work of fiction if it weren't so astonishingly true" ( Publishers Weekly).
 

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Yes, you can access Strange Angel by George Pendle in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Technology & Engineering & Science & Technology Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Prologue
  7. 1. Paradise
  8. 2. Moon Child
  9. 3. Erudition
  10. 4. The Suicide Squad
  11. 5. Fraternity
  12. 6. The Mass
  13. 7. Brave New World
  14. PHOTOGRAPHS
  15. 8. Zenith
  16. 9. Degrees of Freedom
  17. 10. A New Dawn
  18. 11. Rock Bottom
  19. 12. Into the Abyss
  20. Epilogue
  21. Acknowledgments
  22. Source Notes
  23. Index
  24. About the Author