Book Rating
Narrator Rating

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

Unabridged Audio Book

Download On Audiobooks.com
Stream On Audiobooks.com

Download or Stream instantly more than 55,000 audiobooks.
Listen to "Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons" on your iOS and Android device.

Don't have an iOS or Android device, then listen in your browse on any PC or Mac computer.

Author:

Narrator:

Length:

Publisher:

Date:

James Langton

11 Hours 17 Minutes

Brilliance Audio

May 2019

Audio Book Summary

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).

Similar Audio Books