Brilliant Rocket Scientist Killed in Explosion screamed the front-page headline of the Los Angeles Times on June 18, 1952. John Parsons, a maverick rocketeer whose work had helped transform the rocket from a derided sci-fi plotline into a reality, was at first mourned as a tragically young victim of mishandled chemicals. But as reporters dug deeper a shocking story emerged-Parsons had been performing occult rites and summoning spirits as a follower of Aleister Crowley-and he was promptly written off as an embarrassment to science. George Pendle tells Parsons's extraordinary life story for the first time. Fueled from childhood by dreams of space flight, Parsons was a crucial innovator during rocketry's birth. But his visionary imagination also led him into the occult community thriving in 1930s Los Angeles, and when fantasy's pull became stronger than reality, he lost both his work and his wife. Parsons was just emerging from his personal underworld when he died at age thirty-seven. In Strange Angel, Pendle recovers a fascinating life and explores the unruly consequences of genius. In a riveting tale of rocketry, the occult, and boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles, science writer Pendle presents the first in-depth portrait of John Whiteside Parsons, a pioneer in rocket propulsion and an eccentric right out of an Ed Woods movie. Pendle shrewdly places handsome and charismatic Parsons--a man of dramatic contradictions and an insouciance that led to his horrific death at age 37 in 1952--on the cusp between the era in which rockets were dismissed as pulp science fiction fantasy (of which Parsons eagerly partook) and the milieu in which rockets and space travel became realities. A self-taught chemist with an affinity for explosives, Parsons teamed up with Frank Malina and the rest of the so-called Suicide Squad in the dangerous quest for dependable rocket technology. Parsons became cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an aerospace company, but he was also a member of the licentious Church of Thelema, a ludicrous invention of the English mystic Aleister Crowley. Equally cogent in interpreting the scientific and personal facets of Parsons' alluringly scandalous and confounding life, Pendle greatly enlivens the story of rocketry. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved ...elegantly written... Pendle with his graceful, measured prose... skilfully steers us through the quagmire of Parson's personal life -- The Observer Stranger than any fiction, Strange Angel could be a hybrid sired by Gravity's Rainbow out of Foucault's Pendulum ... explosively fascinating. -- Globe and Mail George Pendle writes about science for the Times (London) and the Financial Times, among other publications. He lives in New York City.