Picture of author.
3 Works 122 Membros 7 Reviews

About the Author

George D. Morgan son of Mary Sherman Morgan, is the Playwright in Residence at the California Institute of Technology. He has written more than a dozen stage plays and musicals, including Second to Die, Nevada Belle, and Thunder in the Valley.

Obras de George D. Morgan

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome padrão
Morgan, George D.
Nome de batismo
Morgan, George D.
Data de nascimento
20th Century
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA
Organizações
Dramatists' Guild
Writers' Guild of America

Membros

Resenhas

Pasadena Babalon is George Morgan's 2009 dramatic depiction of the life of rocketry pioneer and occultist Jack Parsons. As such, it was preceded by the 47-minute Jet-Propelled Antichrist (2006) of Ackerman and DuQuette and followed by the ongoing Strange Angel (2018- ) television series of Mark Heyman. Pasadena Babalon debuted onstage at the California Institute of Technology in 2010, and my copy of the book represents the "12/15/2014 draft" of the script.

Most of the play's characters are historical persons, and the fictional ones are carefully distinguished in the "character breakdown" prefaced to the text. Given the facts that Mason gets right and some of the emphases of his presentation, I suspect that he relied heavily on the 2005 Parsons biography Strange Angel by George Pendle. Like Pendle, Mason starts the story with the explosion which killed Parsons.

The play uses a few "FBI-ish" interrogation scenes with Jack as a suspected Communist to create narrative framing. One invented character is Madam B, a clairvoyant boarder at Parsons' Pasadena mansion who supplies dramatic irony by accurately telling their fates to those she encounters. There are a few scenes with cleverly-written fugues and montages to represent such developments as the Arroyo Seco rocketry experiments and Jack's stint at JPL. Another effective dramatic element consists of astral colloquies between Jack and and his spiritual father Crowley.

The script's representations of Thelemic occultism are largely shallow and unpersuasive. Despite the mention of sex magick, Jack's ritual praxis is reduced to chants in dog Latin more suited to Harry Potter. The repeated references to "the Babalon Goddess" are clinkers in Thelemic argot. Another is having Helen refer to "the Laws of Thelema."

In my own reading, I was in part concerned to evaluate the text as a possible candidate for readers theater within a private study group. Ultimately, I decided that it would not serve this purpose well, in part because of the aforementioned fugues, and in part because of the extent to which visual staging elements are intrinsic to the presentation. I did find the read entertaining, and I certainly would go out of my way to attend a full staging of the play.
… (mais)
2 vote
Marcado
paradoxosalpha | May 10, 2020 |
The story of a fascinating incredible woman who was responsible for our ability to put rockets into space. Without her, it’s possible that Wehrner von Braun would not be as well known as he is today. The story is told by her son, who has to research most of her history, since she never spoke about that part of her life. Even his father, who knew her back then, was not very helpful. A good book that could have been great if more details were known.
½
 
Marcado
krazy4katz | outras 5 resenhas | Apr 2, 2020 |
Mary Sherman Morgan grew up dirt-poor in a North Dakota farm family that did not believe in the value of education. Nevertheless, she managed to make it to college, but hadn't even graduated before she was snapped up to work a wartime job as a chemist in a weapons factory. She then went on to become the only female engineer at North American Aviation, although they denied her the actual title of "engineer" due to her lack of a degree. There, she came up with a new rocket fuel mixture that allowed the US to launch its first satellite into space.

Her son, George Morgan, grew up knowing very little about her life, and when he learned about what she'd accomplished, he felt she ought to be given more recognition from the world at large. Hence this book. Here, he lightly sketches his own difficult relationship with his mother and describes some of his researches into her life, as well as how he came to write first a play about her life and then this biography. He also provides fictionalized accounts of various moments in her life, and in the lives of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev, the heads of the US and Soviet rocket programs at the time.

Mary Sherman Morgan's life is certainly a remarkable one, and I am always interested in anything to do with the early days of the space program, so I did find this worth reading, but I can't say I found it entirely satisfying. In the end, one never gets a very good sense of exactly who this woman really was (something that seemed to ultimately elude even her son). And I'm really not a big fan of this particular style of "non-fiction" writing, in which scenes are dramatized complete with dialog and thoughts in people's heads that the author could have no way of actually knowing about. You can never be sure how much of what you're reading is anything like the truth, and how much the author simply invented out of his own mind. And in this case, based on the author's note at the end, it seems like he invented a lot. So, in the end, I'm not at all sure how much more I know now than I did when I started.
… (mais)
½
1 vote
Marcado
bragan | outras 5 resenhas | Jan 20, 2018 |
I saw this book at the bookstore and was intrigued, but something about it made me hesitate, and I decided to check it out from the library instead. While I did enjoy this book, I think I'm pretty happy with this decision.

Mary Sherman Morgan's story was fascinating. Born to poor, abusive parents on an isolated farm in North Dakota, who had to be compelled by the state to send her to school. After graduation, she runs away from home to attend college to study chemistry. After a few years, she is recruited/pressured to drop out to "join the war effort," where she stars making TNT in a factory staffed almost entirely with women. After the war, of course, munitions jobs dry up and the ladies are pressured to retire and make way for the men returning home to look for jobs. Mary applies for and gets a job at North American Aviation anyway, where she builds such a reputation for herself that when the U.S. Army sends a colonel asking for NAA's best man to solve a propellant problem that Dr. van Braun can't crack, it's Mary who gets the job. And it's Mary who eventually solves it, playing a crucial part in the first launch of an American satellite into orbit (and getting the American space program back on track.)

This book is both fascinating and frustrating. Mary was an intensely private person, averse to photographs, who didn't leave much evidence of her life behind, not even min the form of stories shared with her son, who authored this book. George shares his search for any sort of documentation of his mother's career, which turns out to be mostly non-existent. (The documentation, not the career.) Much of her story is pieced together by interviews with Mary's co-workers, who don't want her legacy forgotten after her passing.

The book also seems torn between aspirations of what it wants to be. After I read a few favorite ringing passages to my husband, he said, "That's very theatrical." And I laughed. Of course it was, I just hadn't put the word to it yet. George Morgan is a playwright, and this book grew from a play he wrote about his mother. And as much as George tries to establish his mother's place in the space race, it's also intensely personal, in places more a memoir of his search for information. But as a memoir, it also leaves questions strangely unanswered, like why his father can't or won't fill in more details of his mother's personal story.

Despite any of these shortcomings, this is still a compelling story, and one that needs to be shared.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
greeniezona | outras 5 resenhas | Dec 6, 2017 |

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Associated Authors

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Estatísticas

Obras
3
Membros
122
Popularidade
#163,289
Avaliação
4.1
Resenhas
7
ISBNs
10

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