Strange Angel : The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

Rating:
Summary: FUN AND WEIRD
Review: My name is Jessie and I am a dj at KDGE in Dallas. I have a book club and am always looking for fare that will appeal to our alternative demographic.
For my personal collection of books I tend to gravitate toward those that feed the raging math and science fetishes that I have cultivated since reading The Mystery of the Aleph, Surely You're joking, Mr. Feynman and Possesing Genius.
Strange Angel is absorbing and FUN to read.
The author really does a "marvel"-ous job of helping the layman understand some of the mind blowing minutae of rocket science and simultaneously showing the fascinating history of Pasadena and Los Angeles.
Strange Angel is written in such a way that the reader feels like an actual a part of the action. At one point you feel like you were in the group that bricked up the doorways at Caltech or the gang who took apart a car re-assembled it on the roof of one of the buildings.
You will also meet some of the other great minds of the day, Teller, Oppenheimer, Einstein, etc. The zany anecdotes of the other scientists make this book even more inclusive for the reader.
Death and dismemberment aside there was a flavor to this book reminiscent of the movie Real Genius.
In other words it makes rocket science accessible to a point it appears to be art.
I see that there is ONE individual here on Amazon who keeps signing different names on 12 to 14 different negative reviews . DON'T pay any attention to him/her. They are not offering ANY valid criticisms of the book which is why Amazon has been deleting their continued inflammatory harangues.
Strange Angel is fun and smartly written.
Cheers


Rating:
Summary: What a life!
Review: A friend of mine who is a history of science enthusiast gave me this book, and I found it fascinating. Pendle is an engaging writer, and he shows how rocket science could only have emerged out of as strange and exciting a place as L.A. in the 20s and 30s. I found myself really getting interested in the different intriguing characters that pop up on every page. L. Ron Hubbard plays a part in the story, and there's even a cameo by Howard Hughes (in case you've seen The Aviator!) There were new religions everywhere, and Parsons and his friends were dreaming of space travel while "real" scientists scoffed at the idea. Parsons was inspired by science fiction and the occult. You really get a sense of how much these early rocket scientists had to improvise and how little support they were getting, at first, from established people. I skimmed some of the accounts of occult rituals, but all of Parson's friends from his Temple are real characters. All in all, a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Revealing portrait of a man and his time
Review: An interesting book this. I came upon it quite by accident in my local bookstore and after lookingthrough it I naturally went to Amazon to get a better price. Parsons was a rocket scientist, but not your typical white coated lab rat. For a start Parsons was interested in rockets long before the establishment gave a damn. He and his colleagues, known as the 'Suicide Squad' because of their dangerous experiments, were building rockets in Los Angeles before the Second World War and long before Wernher von Braun and the other German scientists made it over here. Secondly he was self-taught, gaining his inspiration from sci-fi comics and writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thirdly he was the leader of a religious cult. Yup, John Whiteside Parsons was a pretty unusual guy.
Strange Angel tells his story from gilded youth through scientific glory to his mysterious death. The book is very good at portraying the times in which he lived as well as the city of Los Angeles, a weird place to live if ever there was one. I'm not an occultist or anything but even those parts about religious cults and the like were pretty interesting. It must have been the Californian sun but everyone was dreaming big dreams at that time! It seems Parsons had two dreams - one to fly to the moon (something which most scientists thought was an impossibility), the other to become a great practicioner of black magic and travel to other dimensions (something which most people thought, and still think, was crazy). The author is good at drawing together these two parallel stories and by the end of the book you can't help but feel sorry for the poor guy. In effect he was the ultimate LA dreamer, but his dreams weren't always appreciated in the real world. Check this book out if you want to know a little bit more about an unexpected character from an exotic time.

Rating:
Summary: Weird Science
Review: So you're a government funded rocket scientist who has fought long and hard to have your science taken seriously. While most of the guys like to unwind by yapping at the local communist cell meetings, you much prefer to go back home, take off your clothes, and try and conjure up spirits from the other side, with some success I might add. If this sounds like the way you spend your days then you are probably John Whiteside Parsons himself, and have no need for this book. If, however, you're not familiar with this modus operandi, then I strongly advice you to buy this book and get acquainted with one of the US's weirdest and most forgotten scientists.
Not surprisingly there are some pretty weird folk waiting in the wings - L Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, Robert Heinlein, Theodore von Karman, and a host of other driven whack jobs who, whether they be rocket scientists, sci-fi writers or devil worshippers, all strangely seem not that different from each other. Who would have thunk it? Anyhoo, I must give this book the old thumbs up treatment. Scary, weird and sad all at the same time.