L.A. Unconventional

by Los Angeles Times

Book Overview

A bright fine copy with no wear or markings - except to dust jacket which looks nice but has a 1 inch tear and wear to the very front corner. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883792231
• ISBN13: 9781883792237
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Times (Los Angeles Times)
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 9.2" x 11.3"

Customer Reviews

there's the truth and then there's The Truth

If I could give this book more than 5 stars, you just know I totally would. Cecilia Rasmussen is the greatest journalist the LA Times, or any paper ever employed. Once she wrote an article on a bear, it was hilarious! But this book isn't about bears, it's about doing things. Amerikan things. It's full of fun and factual information! This book is a wacky good time read, and you should consider yourself lucky if you can manage to put it down. There are so many zingers and nonsequitors that it puts Joe Franklin hisself to shame. I love this book so much, but I just don't have the words to do it justice. Maybe there aren't words in english that you can describe it with, the closest word I can think of is zomachian, which probably isn't a word at all. Still, this book is so zomachian that I just gotta let Cecilia speak for herself. Here's an amazingly well-researched super facty article of hers, complete with extra fun facts for kids! Life as Satanist Propelled Rocketeer He was an unorthodox genius, a poet and rocket scientist who helped give birth to an institution that would become mankind's window on the universe. He was also a devotee of the black arts, a sci-fi junkie and host of backyard orgies on Pasadena's stately Millionaires' Row. John "Jack" Whiteside Parsons, a founder of the legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a maverick visionary honored with a moon crater bearing his name, gave no early hint of the inner stirrings that propelled him to worship the devil and lead an extraordinary double life: respected scientist by day, dedicated occultist by night. Over a little more than a decade, the tall and vainly handsome Parsons skillfully twinned his two existences as rocketeer and antichrist leader of the occult Ordo Templi Orientis. His mysterious death in an explosion in 1952 left many wondering whether Parsons was a victim of murder or suicide--or simply of an accident at his own momentarily careless hands. Born Marvel Whiteside Parsons in 1914, he was a mama's boy who hated authority and detested social mores. He was reared by his aging, wealthy grandparents and his mother, Ruth. Embittered by her adulterous husband, also named Marvel, who abandoned his family, Ruth began calling her son John. Young John found his companions in poetry, which he read the way other boys read comic books. He also gulped down the space and sci-fi fantasies of Jules Verne. He and his childhood pal, the mechanically gifted Ed Forman, tinkered with black-powder rockets and pocked their backyards with craters. Parsons was at USC when word of Caltech graduate student Frank Malina's project on rocket propulsion and high-altitude rockets reached him and Forman. The young duo brazenly offered to help. Even though neither youth had a degree, Theodore von Karman, the director of Caltech's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and one of the world's leading scientists, took them up on their offer. Unencumbered by academic knowledge, Parsons was a cookbook chemist o