America's First Female Rocket Scientist - The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan

This book takes the reader behind the scenes of the Space Race of the 1950's, into the little known contribution made by the one woman on the engineering team that sent the first U.S. satellite into orbit.

George Morgan's mother became singularly, almost pathologically, uncommunicative after she retired from North American Aviation. So her son had to reconstruct her life from the relatively few remaining sources available to him. He had to reverse engineer it, so to speak, probably inventing a lot of the specific dialogue that appears along the way. But he has come up with an entertaining, fast-read of a book that is both poignant and reportorial.

Much of the poignant part can be found in the first chapters of the book in which George describes his mother's bleak childhood on the North Dakota plains. She had indifferent parents, and positively cruel brothers who burdened her with much of the work around the farm, and who regularly taunted and lashed her. A lot of her youth was spent trying to hide from their sadism. If her brothers are still alive, they can't be happy to read this reflection of themselves.

The book goes on to narrate how Mary boosted herself out of this environment with sheer determination, and set herself into her own orbit over wider horizons.

The author tells the story through closely intercut sections of narrative that alternate between Mary's life and the lives of other important players in the race for space. We read what Wernher von Braun was doing along the way, and some of the circumstances under which he moved from being a top engineer of the Third Reich to being the man who gained most of the credit for launching the U.S. Explorer I. Some of the precarious life of Sergei Korolev, a key engineer responsible for the U.S.S.R.'s preemptive launch of Sputnik, is also interlaced through this account. Then George interjects his own experiences producing a play about his mother's life, and trying to set the record straight when he found someone else claiming credit for the discovery of Hydyne on Wikipedia.

Some of these quick cuts that jog the reader back and forth in time and place get to be a bit confusing, and the author's personal umbrage at the recent misattribution is a bit distracting. However, I guess it is necessary to establish credit. I also found myself wanting to know more about the science behind Mary Sherman Morgan's discovery of the right fuel mix necessary to deliver the power to launch a satellite. I'd like to have had the difference between "fuel" and "oxidizer" explained, and I'd liked to have read a bit more of the basics of the different components of a satellite launch system. I also wish an update on these discoveries was included. Is NASA still using the unique Hydyne fuel mix that Mary discovered? I think some of these issues could have been covered without weighing the reader down with too much technical jargon.

Overall though, this is an informative, touching book that takes the reader back to the time, not so long ago, when women were discounted and rendered all but invisible on the national scene.

If you'd like to read about other women whose discoveries were often preempted by men, or whose insights have been largely buried in the history records - I recommend Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, the biography of the woman who first projected the double helix, Watson and Crick notwithstanding. I also recommend Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr, the actress whose discovery of a means of wireless communication helped us win WWII and is the basis for a lot of our ability to communicate wirelessly to this day.

When George Morgan's mother died, he wrote an obituary for the LA Times. But they refused to run it. Why? Because his claims that his mother played an important role in the field of rocket science could not be substantiated.

Mr. Morgan went on to rectify that. Little was known and even less written about Mary Sherman Morgan's work, first in the ordnance field during World War II and then with rocket fuels as America scrambled to get a satellite aloft. He researched his mother's life through the little documentation he could lay his hands on and interviewed family and long-ago colleagues. He went on to write a play that was produced by a theater company at Cal Tech. Then he decided to write this book.

With so little documentation to rely on, Mr. Morgan has to imagine a lot. And that he does. The book is an odd mishmash of narrative and invented scenes and dialog. He is honest enough to tell us how much he had to make up. That didn't bother me. What bothered me is the jarringly modern tone he adopts for his mother's voice, conversations and interactions. It struck me as so out of place for the period (the 1940s) that I had to keep reminding myself of when and where I was.

Mr. Morgan tells us a little about his mother's personality and life outside of work, but not much. What he does say is so startling that I just couldn't get my mind to focus on her work life. I wanted to know more about this woman who as his mother did not speak to him -- at all! -- did not hug, kiss or touch him, did not attend his school functions; in fact, did not acknowledge his presence in any way. Apparently, after she quit work to raise a family, she did nothing but sit and smoke, drink coffee and shuffle cards. How is this possible? And, if this is the case, isn't he angry? Why is he so eager to make a name for her and keep her memory alive? He hints at some obsessive compulsive behaviors and imagines some hallucinations she might have suffered (the oddest scenes in the book!), but he says so little that readers can neither identify with him nor understand her.

Beyond that, a few things about the writing bothered me. I become frustrated when writers won't take thirty seconds to look up a fact that can be known. For example, the author talks about the morning routine at his Catholic school, which includes the playing of a bugle as the children line up: "I can still hear the tune in my head, but I don't know the name. I think it's something Sousa wrote for the Marines." Look it up! Type in "Sousa march" on youtube and you'll find it. And, his editor should have resolved some contradictions and omissions. He states that his mother's parents refused to get her glasses as a child, despite her nearsightedness. Yet, in her high school graduation photo, she's wearing glasses. Where did they come from? These are certainly minor details, but they add up as you go along. The book's organization -- or disorganization is more like it -- yanks the reader between three or four story threads that in the end make sense, but are annoying in the telling, because you can't imagine why you're being taken on this wild goose chase.

I'm always glad to know more about unsung heroes -- the only woman among 900 engineers and analysts at her company! -- so I'm happy to have read this book. But I suspect I might have liked the play a little better.

George Morgan's book about his mother is fascinating, and especially so to me since I coauthored a history of the era in question that Morgan used a source. I just couldn't get comfortable with his way of telling the story.
To say the most important thing first, Mary Sherman Morgan's invention of hydyne was a critical contribution at a critical time in the Space Race. The new fuel enabled the Jupiter C, a booster based on Wernher con Braun's Redstone missile, to put Explorer I into orbit. And none of us knew anything about it. My coauthor Erika and I spent years researching this era and never heard of her. In part it was because the government documents of the time never mentioned who at her company produced the idea, and in part it was because she was so stone-silent about it for the rest of her life. Still, I feel bad that we didn't include her in our book The First Space Race.
To say she was a woman in a man's world is putting it mildly: there were 900 men and Mary. Her determined climb from a dirt-poor North Dakota farm to her work in complex chemistry makes for a story that should have been told long ago. I never knew the fuel problem was as difficult as it was: Mary and her colleagues were not allowed to vary the flow rates, change any machinery, or tinker with anything except the chemistry itself. Yet they had to produce a significant performance increase, and thanks to her encyclopedic knowledge of chemicals and ability to intuit and then calculate how they would behave, they did. The chapter on engine tests was fascinating, and the one on Explorer I's launch is an oft-mistold tale that's presented accurately here: I'm glad The First Space Race helped Morgan do a great job with it.
Morgan's story of his own generation of the family, including the discovery of who his mother really was for a major part of her life and meeting a sister Mary once gave up for adoption, is very touching.
There are some unfortunate factual errors. Specific impulse is a measure of efficiency, not power. The Jupiter C had four stages, not three. The short-range Redstone was far from being an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and no knowledgeable person would have referred to it as one. No Redstone was never loaded with sand, although the top stage of one Jupiter-C variant was, and that tiny "scaled Sergeant" fourth stage certainly could not have held a ton of it.
Morgan's technique of novelizing the story, with made-up characters and dialogue, severely damages the book's value as history because it's not clear what is fiction and what is fact. I realize the approach arose out of the dearth of first-person information (Mary never said a word to her children about her work) and the book's origin as a stage play: in a play, there is no choice but to invent at least some dialogue. It can lead readers to believe, though, that Russia's Sergei Korolev was determined to beat ex-enemy von Braun into space, whereas the authoritative sources on Korolev, James Harford and Asif Siddiqi, give no hint of that. The melodramatic reaction of a fictitious Army colonel to having a woman on the project needlessly amps up the sexism when the factual situation was dramatic enough.
I'm glad Morgan wrote this book. He's a good writer, and this story cried out to be told. I just wish he'd done it a little differently.

Matt Bille, author, The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites (Texas A&M/NASA, 2004)

I quite enjoyed learning about Mary Sherman Morgan, the chemist who developed hydene, the fuel that allowed America to send its first satellite into orbit. History of science is always interesting to me, and the struggles of female scientists and engineers are especially intriguing. It's so easy to forget how much things have changed. And to read her story, to see how easily she might have been derailed from her career at any point, is especially poignant. The importance of the social worker intervening to get her enrolled in school - to the point of providing a horse - yet again shows how much things have changed.

As an engineer, my favorite sections are in the nitty-gritty of the development of hydene, where she and her assistants are going through the options, eliminating possibilities, solving the technical problems, and then when she gets to attend the test firings. The problem of finding a fuel to power a rocket that is already built (by men! :-) ) is a steep one, and a fairly common type of challenge - the problem of rescuing a project that is far down the wrong path. I don't think a lay reader would find it overly technical, however.

As a reader, I was a little distressed and distracted by the personal details that went with many of the anecdotes. The book was written by her son after Mary's death, and by his account she rarely talked about her life. It was odd to have a footnote on the date she graduated from high school in the same chapter with a detailed account of her running away from her family to attend college that was as far as I could tell, without reference. It made it difficult to decide what was invented, what was guessed and pieced together, and what was totally grounded in fact. He handled this originally by writing it as a play, and some of the play is apparently here in the narrative. But, it's also intermixed with sections of the author talking about gathering information and about how the play was produced.

The end effect is a little disjointed, but it's still a really terrific story and well worth reading. I look forward to my daughter reading it some day.

I really liked Rocket Girl by George D Morgan. Morgan, the son of Mary Sherman Morgan, did an excellent job of researching his mother's, almost nonexistent, background. What he discovered was an early childhood that was extremely poor, the great desire of Mary S Morgan to gain an education, a relative, and great pride in the scientific work of his mother. Morgan made his mother and the other people come alive in the book and made you want to cheer for them.

I would highly recommend this book to readers who like: science, women who succeed beyond their wildest expectations, space travel, non-fiction and history.

I own auto/biographies of almost all the men who have walked on the moon. I own auto/biographies of many of the people who made this happen including NASA Flight Directors, scientists, and men from industry who built the rockets and moon vehicles. I'm also an engineer so technical history books intrigue me. As such, I was eager to read the book "Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist" which is billed as the "personal history and historic events" of Mrs Morgan's early life and professional career. I also looked forward to hearing about the contributions that our many many female engineers and scientists made to our country's space exploration history. However, I was left greatly wanting - mostly trying to decipher which of the book was fact and which was the concoction of author George D. Morgan's imagination.

From Mason's foreword, we learn that in an attempt "to get the word out about his mother's contribution to the space program", he wrote a play that ran at the California Institute of Technology. A noble cause, but obviously you would expect a play to include glorified or fictional accounts in order to make it more enjoyable to the audience. You do not, however, expect that from a book which is billed as a "personal history with historic events". Although there is an Endnote section, most of the verifiable notes are from books on Wernher Von Braun. Those notes that DO pertain to Mrs. Morgan are either miscellaneous trivialities (such as the author stating that he has his mother's birth and death certificates) or from questionable sources (including the RAMPANT use of Wikipedia as the author's primary source) which could only lead me to the clearer and clearer conclusion that the book was predominantly a fictionalized narrative sprinkled in with what little actual facts the author could glean from interviews with Mrs. Morgan's co-workers. The sections of the book Mrs. Morgan's formative years were among the worst examples of this as the author has actually sprinkled in dialogue, which can only have been dreamed up by the author, to punch up what was obviously a dark portion of Mrs. Morgan's past that the author himself admits his family knows almost nothing about. This is not a historical narrative.

Even when the author attempts to sprinkle in actual facts, he has it wrong. He talks about an episode in Mrs. Morgan's early childhood where there is deep mud in November in Ray, ND. The author has obviously NEVER been to North Dakota in November or he'd have known there would have probably been a foot of snow and not mud deep enough to swallow a car (I lived there for three - long, cold - years. Even throwaway, "see how smart I am", comments are not 100% correct. The author states that "North American Aviation (was) the forerunner of Rocketdyne". This is sort of true in VERY simplistic, child-like terms. North American (NAA) spun off Rocketdyne in the 50's as a wholly-owned subsidiary (as anyone who has known anything about aerospace history knows that North American did more than just make rocket fuel). Later both would be merged with Rockwell to form (eventually) Rockwell International in the late 60's. Today, Rocketdyne is part of Pratt & Whitney. I go through these two specific examples to highlight the major failing of the book - even the author's truths aren't truths. And there are many MANY many more examples - so many I stopped notating them in my copy of the book.

However, by far the most egregious example of the book's short-comings was the author's intellectual dishonesty of linking Mrs. Morgan's career with that of Von Braun. I'm sorry, but this basically amounts to the Sesame Street television game "Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Other?" Yes, Mrs. Morgan made a significant contribution to the Jupiter-C/Juno/Redstone rocket family by being the lead scientist in the development of the Hydyne fuel that powered SOME of these rockets. However, it was a technological dead end and thus a stop-gap footnote in history. Equating Mrs. Morgan's small, albeit necessary, role in the advance of the US rocketry industry to all that was Wernher Von Braun (good, bad, and otherwise) is beyond laughable. There are thousands of inventors in our past and present who made notable, albeit temporary, additions to science. There are also thousands of inventors whose additions are largely forgotten due to their invention being a technological deadend - Mrs. Morgan is just a female example of that. No better, no worse. Not everyone can be an Otis, Bell, or Ford, or on the female side, Virginia Apgar, Bette Nesmith, Ruth Handler, or Stephanie Kwolek.

Bottomline for me on this book, was that I really struggled with what to believe and what not to believe that's a crying shame. Mrs. Morgan obviously was an extremely intelligent individual and her story deserves to be told. However, the fairy tale narrative only serves to drag the real life picture down and truly ruin the book. There are whole chapters here that should probably be tossed as being inconsequential to the overall narrative, blatant fantasy, or both. However, I think the author would be left with too few pages for an actual, no kidding, book and maybe THAT is the real story... If you want to write a fictional play about your mom in order to drum up interest - that's great and I applaud you. However, don't then turn around and repackage your play as some type of historically accurate treatise on the history of aerospace and the (tenuously far-fetched) connections between your mom and one of the luminaries of US Space Program history.

Everyone involved has a piece in truly historic events. However, not everyone can be a Washington, or a Lindberg, or a Patton, or a Kennedy, or a Von Braun. Even the lowly buck private serving chow in the mess had a part in the victory in Europe (an army lives on its stomach), but this private isn't saying he made D-Day a success or likening his endeavors to Eisenhower. Sy Liebergot made a truly notable impact on the space program when he was a part of the team that helped the Apollo 13 crew limp home, but he isn't running around the country saying that he was as important during the crisis as Flight Director Gene Kranz or astronauts Lovell, Swigert and Haise. Everyone carrying the spear has an impact in ensuring that the tip is driven home on target. There is no shame in saying you were part of the "cast of thousands". However, the author's implication that her career was more than it actually was is just kidding himself and lying to your readers.

There are few people who wanted to love Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist more than I did. I am female and a scientist, a chemist, well aware that all too often those girls who do dare to do science and math often come up short when it comes to handing around the kudos. Rosalind Franklin comes instantly to mind, a King's College scientist whose work was the critical basis for the discovery of DNA by Watson & Crick. More than a few scientists have long believed that Franklin should have shared in the Nobel. Sadly, she did not.

I also happen to be a just a bit older than author George D. Morgan, our mothers of the same generation. I fully empathize with Morgan's desire to fill in all the missing pieces of his mother's life. My own mother came to visit me in Germany about the time that my eldest child was four months old. As we were leaving the Frankfurt airport she looked around at the scenery, said "Why I haven't been here since . ." and clapped both hands over her mouth. I never did find out when or why she was in Germany, nor get answers to any of the 101 other questions that I had. My mother took an oath of secrecy, as did more than a few during the war years, and she took her secrets to her grave.

That said, I'm afraid that I find Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist far more STORY than HIStory. Some of this simply reads as untrue, starting with the milking of the family cow by 8 year old Mary. I've been around cows and cow barns most of my life and I've never heard of anyone hobbling the cow with a belt and then milking them in a mud puddle rather than the barn standing close by, never mind the fact that 8 year olds generally don't have the hand strength to milk the family cow. Our introduction to the North Dakota farmer that was Mary's father, passed out in a chair encircled by empty wine bottles (wine?) made the appearance of the silent mother and brothers so very abusive that I could not help but consider the possibility of sexual abuse as well later in the story a huge surprise.

I believe that Morgan has misinterpreted some things, not the least of which is his idea the Mary may have been fired from North American when she "retired" at the time of his brother's birth. Well into the 1970s middle and upper class women did in fact almost universally leave their employment to "raise a family" when children came along. There is nothing whatever unusual in Mary Morgan having done so. Moreover, she was working in the field of chemistry, developing fuel. Even today, many private employers insist that pregnant workers not be involved in activities like this. In fact, several years ago there was a flap here in Vermont when it came to light that a manufacturer of batteries refused to hire women who were not sterile, simply because of the enormous potential danger to the fetus should they get pregnant. When Mary writes on an employment application in the 1970's that she had left her previous job to "raise a family" she was quite likely telling the exact truth.

There is one other thing that I find I must mention. There are two groups of scientists. One group works in academia. Rosalind Franklin belonged to this group. Their discoveries and inventions are their own, as are any intellectual property rights that might result from their work. The other group, including Mary Sherman Morgan, work for private employers. It is virtually always a condition of employment that because they are performing work for hire, any and all intellectual property rights (often including even the right to be named as the "discoverer") belong to the company, not the individual. This is as true today as it was in 1953.

Grandma's $0.02 - I found Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist to be far more story than history, poorly documented, often misinterpreted and confusing to the reader.

When Wernher Von Braun's eminent team of scientists fail to develop the type of rocket propellant they need to launch a rocket or satellite into space, the task is contracted out to North American Aviation with the explicit instuctions to put their best man on the job. It just so happens that out of their 900 engineers their best man for the job is a woman. A woman who has experience but no college degree. Luckily her boss stands by her and she ends up inventing hydyne, the propellant that launches America's first satellite into space. She receives accolades from Von Braun and her colleagues, but remains largely a mystery to those closest to her. It turns out she came from a male chauvinist rural North Dakota farm upbringing and even had a child put of wedlock that she gave up for adoption. So she remains out of the pages of history, until now. Written by her son, this book narrates the events of her life combined with the important events of Von Braun's life and the Russian scientist's life as well. He also includes segments of his own life researching his Mother's story. So the voice of the narrative swiches topics and time periods, but blends together in a cinematic fashion. My only complaint is that I think it would have been neat if they had included a copy of Von Braun's congratulatory letter in the pictures section. As that is neat. However, the book is a fascinating and a very readable one. The author has done his Mother and history justice with this book.

Mary Morgan was a brilliant person who made many important contributions despite the gender bias that she fought so hard against. This story started out with her education and then her fight to obtain employment in an all-male workforce. She quickly excelled and made astounding contributions into a field that is difficult to make even basic contributions. This book was a great read and I learned a lot about the early rocket work. I am glad that George Morgan took the effort to understand his mother and present her story.

At the beginning of his "Acknowledgements" section, Morgan states, "This is an imperfect book. It's imperfect because it relates a chapter of history that has not been well recorded." If prizes could be awarded for understatement, this should certainly receive one. What this book IS, in my opinion, is hugely timely. There is tremendous conflict occurring at this exact moment between the power brokers who want to control access to the vast quantity of information exchange that the development of satellite communications and the Internet have made available and those who believe that such control is tyranny and must be resisted.

From a literary point of view, because George Morgan is first and foremost a playwright, there is a great deal of reliance on dialog to move the story. It is understood that because of his mother's extreme uncommunicativeness, much of this dialog had to be imagined by the author, but it is extraordinarily authentic, as are several vignettes of Mary's early life that he intersperses throughout the narrative. Also intriguing are the interjections of information, drawn from other biographical sources, about the Russian rocket scientist Korolev and German-American von Braun. This book is a very fast read, and does not overwhelm the reader with too much technical information, but certainly maintains the dynamic tension of the very first days of the "Space Race".

Speaking from a personal perspective, I can testify to the extreme validity of Morgan's sense that this story HAD to be told, not only for his own personal need to understand what was going on in his mother's life, but to focus the extreme imbalance of the political atmosphere versus the scientific impetus during the mid-20th Century, and the incredible underutilization of the highly qualified women who were by then available as a result of WWII. Evelyn, the wife of my high school art teacher, had a very similar story to Mary Morgan's. She was a scientist at Los Alamos labs during the development of the Atomic Bomb. As a technician without a doctorate, she was one of the real movers of the program, literally in on the ground floor. She told me once that she had trained ALL the newly minted PhD's that were hired on - but then, because they had degrees and were male, they were inevitably promoted over her. Like Mary, like Evelyn, and doubtless like scores of others, female and male, whose genius has contributed to the technologies of today, we need both much greater openness and much deeper awareness that it's what you DO, not what degree you've earned, that matters. I am profoundly grateful to have had the chance to be further enlightened by George Morgan's exceptional book.

Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist is a highly-readable story written by Mary Morgan's son.

This book tells a truly compelling story, falling somewhere between a cursory narrative and detailed, highly-researched, accounting of Mary Morgan's life. In all there is surprisingly little information about this woman's life, but the author really brings the details that are known to life by couching known parts of Mary Morgan's life among relevant and varied goings-on in the world of the time, be it the Great Depression, World War II or the Cold War.

In general the story tells of Mary's earliest challenges of moving out of agrarian poverty, being the first member of her family to attend college. From there she faces the struggle of having to put up a child for adoption to pursue her chemistry career in an age when it wasn't possible to be a single, working mother. In the end, she has a successful career and moves on to raise a family. Some parts of the narrative, especially of the distant past, were romanticized, but never over-the-top and they definitely served to give a feel for the environment in which Mary grew up.

The book is told from several viewpoints and has a number of counterpoints that are focused on, most notably the dissolution of Nazi rocket program and the subsequent USSR vs. USA rivalry. Werner Von Braun and Russian rocket scientists have their stories told as part of the backdrop, helping keep Mary's accomplishments in perspective. Her accomplishments in rocket chemistry are much more detailed, probably owing to the fact that the author was able to locate and interview her colleagues from the time.

When I first picked this book, I was concerned that it would be a "me too" book about the first female "x" or "y." I'm so glad I picked it up and read it through. Mary's accomplishments are all the more amazing given the limitations of the environment she lived in. Kudos to the author for uncovering as much as he did about his secretive mother's past.

I noticed the author was not shy about having a very short or very long chapter when the content dictated this. This really speaks to the honesty of the writing. I definitely give this book five stars.

As a female scientist, I often find myself searching for role models and finding them to be few and far between, for several reasons: 1) there were a lot fewer women scientists in the past than there are today (and we are still too often a minority) and 2) historically many female scientists have not received credit for their pioneering work. As a result, I was extremely happy to have this book cross my path.
This book is beautiful and poignant. Mary Sherman Morgan's tale is incredible. She raised herself up from grinding poverty to become a rocket scientist. You don't accomplish something like that without incredible grit and determination. Also, where other's found her son's interjections to be a distraction, I found them very useful. Many women scientists worry about having children because there simply is no time off provided in academia and because we work so much we cannot keep up with the pinterest mommy generation. To have her son speak of her with such love and such power is a beautiful testament of not only her impact on the space race, but also her impact on the world through raising a good child. I personally found this comforting as I am reaching the place in my life where I am considering whether or not to have children.
I agree that parts of the book land toward the realm of a good story rather than a biography, but the characters so thoroughly leap off the page that I am willing to excuse it. I wish there were more detailed data on her contributions, but I wonder if some of these wholes are due to records being lost and not to lack of due diligence on the author's part.
All in all, I highly recommend this book and hope it will prompt similar works about other great women scientists.

My rating is really more 3.5 stars so I rounded to 4. And, yes, I will do that simply because there's a scarcity of stories about the women who helped develop our space age. As is true with just about any publisher's marketing department, Mary Sherman Morgan's contribution is overstated on the book's cover, but they have to sell books so I ingested the grain of salt and moved ahead. This doesn't mean her story isn't important or remind us of the contributions of the hundreds, and even thousands, of folks--men and women--who made a contribution to developing technologies in the 20th century. Hers is more important than many and the story of a woman scientist during this time period of space exploration should be read and appreciated, even found inspirational, for she overcame hardship and challenges and contributed.

That said, this book plays on the fringes of historical fiction based on fact more than true nonfiction with dialogue that could only be suppositioned by the author who admittedly had a lack of materials to use. Despite his commendable search for anything and everything he could use to tell his mother's story, the story here is lacking at times. So I turned off my history lesson brain and appreciated the book as a touching memorial by a son to his mother, a mother who broke some barriers and was a talented scientist. And the book served as another reminder that those making history are often too busy to record their processes. And those with hardships didn't necessarily share, especially during this time period in history, leaving our imaginations to fill in the gaps to create a story that will hold interest and fill an entire book.

This is not a conventional biography. But in this case that's a good thing. It's a personal story -- the author is the subjects son -- told engagingly well. It combines three main stories; the life of a pioneering female rocket engineer, the early space programs in Germany/Russia/US, and the story of the son learning about family secrets and the making of the play (which became the book). It's unconventional, but it works. It's readable, its engaging, its fascinating. Worthwhile for folks who nothing about the Space Race, or people that have read most every other astronaut bio in the bookstore.

It's not perfect. Some of the scenes read too much like a novel and it's hard to know where fact ends and artistic interpretation starts. The subject was intensely personal and left very few papers/diaries/etc behind to help research the story. And any combination of multiple elements will have too much of one side for some peoples taste. But it's a solid contribution to the history of the rockets that powered man into space, and it's a cool read. Five stars. Hope this review helps you.

I really liked this book about Mary Sherman Morgan, the woman who helped America break the grip of gravity in order to launch men and women into orbit. It is written by her son who tried to piece the secret life of his mother together. He learns that she headed the team that developed the rocket fuel for the Redstone rocket during the fifties during the Cold War. Her story is compelling for she appears to have been mostly self-taught. Although she went to college, truth be told, it appears not to be much of one. On top of it, she did not graduate since she was almost broke and needed to join the work force during World War II working for an ordnance manufacturer as a chemist testing chemicals for purity.

She was given a daunting task by her employer to develop a fuel for an engine that was already configured. With the assistance of a small team, they were able to develop the fuel which allowed the United States to compete with the former Soviet Union. She succeeded where Wernher von Braun's team could not. That was a prize worth winning.

It is not a poetic book, but it is a book about discovery: the discovery made by Ms. Morgan and the discovery made by her son about his mother who he remembers as distant and different from all other mothers. He clearly develops new found respect for a woman who succeeded in a man's world.

"Rocket Girl" is written, by the author's own admission, in a style known as creative nonfiction. Much of it is in narrative form, but many of the specific details were invented by the author due to lack of information. In the acknowledgments section, he begins by stating, "This is an imperfect book. It's imperfect because it relates a chapter of history that has not been well recorded." The major facts are usually correct, but many of the details have been made up to keep the narrative readable.

And while he has obviously done quite a bit of research, including many primary sources, some of his sources do not meet the rigorous standards of academic publications. For example, he references Wikipedia in the footnotes.

Finally, this is a book written by a son about his mother, and it's also partially autobiographical. So there is some sentimentality.

But if you can get past all of that, "Rocket Girl" is a great read. It gives insight into an important piece of American history that was kept hidden for 50+ years. Recommended.

George Morgan dropped by our offices a while back. It was very informative about some aspects of the reviews I read prior to buying this book. Mr. Morgan wrote this book in a rush. He said that normally a writer would have 3-4 times the amount of time to write a book of this length. The Rocketdyne of those years does not exist anymore. The age of the computer is now at hand and most engineers would not know how to use a slide rule (I am not one of them). Still, the same tenacity exists in the people who work here that Mary showed in her resolve to find a solution to this. enormous problem. Mary Morgan should be remembered for her great gifts as an analyst/engineer. This book is a fine story of what it is like to solve these wonderfully complex problems that I/we get to solve from day-to-day.

O.K., I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Morgan is a screenwriter by career and not a biographer but he does a great job with this biographic of his mother, despite the struggle for information and verification. His ability to piece it all together and creatively "fill in the blanks" makes for a smooth read. What a fascinating story as well. I have to say I had a vested interest in reading it initially as there was some familiarity with bits of Mrs. Morgan's story and my own mother's. My mom was a "victim" of MKULTRA - another operation related to Operation Paperclip. Growing up my siblings and I thought our childhood years were "normal". It wasn't until adulthood that my sister and I began piecing together odd things we had picked up on, and doing further research. Mom's experience was vastly different from Mary's but both were "involved" in classified post WWII operations. A lot of bizarre stuff came out of the cold war era and for so many years it was classified so we were unaware of it. "Rocket Girl" gives a great overview to some of the cold war activities that are a part of nation's history.

I enjoyed this book. It is a fascinating look at the life of America's first female rocket scientist. Author George D. Martin, the subject's son, writes in the very easy manner, albeit at times melodramatic. He also does a great job of covering the social and political elements of the times. Also interesting are the chapters that he wrote about his challenges in finding out information about his mother's early life. On the downside, many of the events were described in so much detail that the material did not seem credible. Finally, in the author's note at the end of the book, Martin admits that a lot of the dialogue in the book and details of the story are fabricated. This does not change the way I feel about the book since it is obviously a fictionalized account, but I would have liked to have seen this admission upfront. Even though it is fictionalized, I still recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of science.

There are many unsung heroes out there, who have contributed to major historical events but are never recognized (as many graduate students know.....) This is a story of one of them. Mary Sherman Morgan was a brilliant scientist and mathematician. She contributed in a major way to the space program by innovating a new type of rocket fuel. But until her son wrote about her life, she was not recognized outside of the company where she worked in the 60's. This book is a fascinating read about her life, her accomplishments, and the role of women in the world of engineering.

As a women in a scientific field, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Mary's life. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the history of engineering and the space program!

BTW, I also just read "A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey" by Michael d'Antonio. The stories parallel, but not one word about Mary in this book - too bad it missed a great part of the story!

Who can resist the mere title and cover of this book? The story itself begs for Hollywood treatment. A girl who grows up with abusive parents and siblings runs away from home to go to college and manages to land a job working as a chemical engineer at Plumbrook Station during the height of WWII formulating TNT (leaving midway through college for the job). Along the way, she discovers love and loss when her out of wedlock child is put up for adoption. When she moves to California, her mathematical skills and chemical insight developed during the war land her a job as the only woman working in a facility of 900 men at Rocketdyne. Despite having no college degree (she is officially an "analyst", not an engineer") and being a woman, she gets one of the toughest assignments at the company. The Russians have beat the US to space with Sputnik, and Von Braun needs a rocket propellant that will work in the existing Redstone rocket to get it into orbit. Little can be changed in the rocket - the secret must lie in the chemistry. I love any good tale where the engineer plays the hero.

The book itself is a labor of love by George Morgan, the son of Mary Sherman Morgan. Through interviews with her former coworkers, he attempts to find out about the secret work she did so he can publicize her contribution to the US space effort. The problem (as noted by another review), is that the book is truly hard to verify. He doesn't document his conversations well (he is a playwright, not a biographer), and many of the conversations are obviously the product of his fertile imagination. It makes the narrative strong and compelling, but you know that much of it must be conjecture. Unfortunately, that conjecture and the lack of notes on the facts does damage to his mother's legacy. I would prefer a short 5-10 page epilogue with the bare facts as known including sources such as interviews. Sadly that much is missing from the book.

As an engineer, I appreciated the author's approach. He shows how Mary Sherman Morgan first decided the specifications of what she needed (specific impulse, density, availability, etc), and the proceed backwards to figure out what material would make the product she envisioned she needed. Along the way, the book is also a tale of growing up in North Dakota, the lives of the Nazi German rocket engineers, the Russian Space Program, and the US Space Program. The perspective shifts time and place quite a bit, which is not always handled smoothly, but it is effective.

The short of it is that I really enjoyed the book and as inspiration for engineers and scientists, male or female, it is wonderful. I would approach the history with caution, but still would recommend the book. Note - discussions of out of wedlock birth might limit the books appropriateness for older readers.

Our parents are often mysteries to us. While we have the special privilege of knowing them as parents, we don't know them as friends or colleagues. Often those few bits we glean come as real surprises. Imagine the surprise felt by author George Morgan as he begins to assemble his own mother's history after her death. It was a history she had worked hard to obliterate. It was a history as an unloved child, an unwed mother, a munitions chemist and finally--the designer of the rocket fuel that launched America's first satellite.

The place of women in mid-century America is an awkward place. After proving themselves as managers, laborers, engineers and pilots, the shifting postwar economy pushed them--hard--into the role of vapid and obedient helpmates. Not all of them wanted to go, and fewer still managed to keep serious careers afloat. Mary Sherman Morgan was that exception. The only woman in a sea of aviation engineers, she became a valuable team member--prized for her attitude, her knowledge and her brains. She wasn't a warrior for women--she just wanted to do the work. Even her final letter of recommendation from Werner Von Braun was addressed to "Unknown Lady". He appreciated the work, but couldn't be bothered to learn about the person who had done it. Little documentation remains and much of the history has been modified in favor of male managers who had little to do with the actual work. Most of the book is based on the recollections of her surviving colleagues who hold her in enduring respect.

There is also an atmosphere of sadness that permeates the book. While the portrait of Mary's working life shows her to be a focused, respected and popular person, the mother was closed, distant, and a little obsessed with privacy. One can only imagine the toll of walking away from such a career to become "just another mom".

This book had its origins in a stage play written by George Morgan a few years earlier. It maintains many elements of the play, mainly in the many reconstructions and imagined dialogs. A true historian would have numerous quibbles with this aspect of the book. But true historians had half a century to unearth this story and it remained untold. A son has paid an homage to a special woman, and put together a crackerjack story to boot. This is a book that begs for a film treatment, and I hope it happens someday.

George Morgan does take some liberties with strict historical accuracy in his account of his mother's life. These are due partly to his intention to make the story readable (and he plainly identifies his work as "creative nonfiction"), and partly to the gaps in documentation of her life.

The achievement which places Mary Morgan in the history of the space race is her invention of "hydyne", a fuel mixture that gave Wernher von Braun's Redstone rocket the power it needed to launch America's first satellite within some 60 days of the USSR's launch of Sputnik. Many will remember — and this book reports — the severe psychological blow this country suffered when "the commies" beat it into space on 4 October 1957.

The author interleaves the story of his mother's life and work with major developments of rocketry during and after World War II: Germany's V2, Korolev's work in the USSR, and von Braun's development of the Redstone / Jupiter C. He includes the exploit of one Private Galione, based on a book by Galione's daughter, and he does not overlook the geopolitical background of the Cold War.

This all adds up to a gripping and inspiring account. It is not perfect. For one thing, it starts off by giving the impression that Mary's father Michael Sherman is a drunken wastrel. We later learn this is not true, that he does work his North Dakota farm and even does amateur veterinary work for other local farmers. Also, as others have noted, the author makes up one character and a good deal of the dialogue — as he admits in an Author's Note (pp. 295-6). This is no scholarly history. It is nevertheless worth reading.

I wanted so much to love this tribute to a super smart, resourceful, private woman from her son, (p 295) "There came a day when I decided there was only one way a memoir like that could be written: as my own journey and adventure in finding that hidden treasure." Unfortunately, the writing got in the way.

Mary Sherman was born in 1921 in Ray, North Dakota and raised on the family farm, started school late, graduated valedictorian of her high school class, attended La Salle College, left without a degree to work in a munitions plant, then got a job at North American Aviation, where she accomplished the feat that led Walter, one of her coworkers at NAA, to tell Mary's son (p 14), "In 1957, your mother single-handedly saved America's space program...and nobody knows except a bunch of old men." Ms. Sherman did design a rocket fuel mixture jet propellant (dubbed Hydyne) that was used to launch the first US satellite, designed by Wernher von Braun (and, in fact, it was never used again), but she certainly did not do so "single-handedly."

Although the story has its bright spots (one of my favorites being the banter between Ms. Sherman and the two guys tasked with helping her design the rocket fuel mixture), they are too often diminished by sometimes clumsy writing. Forced to fill in the details (and dialogue) because his mother was not forthcoming with information, he takes (too much, I think) license. For example, he includes a silly scene during which Mary explains the alphabet to the family cow, Irma, which he describes as a (p 31) "loquacious milker." Another involves a colonel who he portrays as sexist, who demands that the right man for the job (of designing the fuel) is a man. And the bit about the California condor hurt my I-hate-contrivance brain.

That his intent is to write the memoir as his "journey" is apparent, but doesn't work. It reads like he wrote every chapter independently, then crammed it all together as best he could. And although the format is generally chronological, there are asides in which he is obviously trying to include stories he's heard about his mother's childhood (her siblings teasing her, being hit by a switch, kittens killed) that feel forced. Each time it felt like I finally got into the flow of a chapter (the creative fiction parts being more interesting than his asides about the journey), he changed gears. In fact, I'd have rather he'd placed all of the background about how he came to obtain the information for the book in a Foreward and Afterward (even an extensive one of each) than mix it all together with creative fiction. In addition, he uses a few overly pretentious words that don't fit the rest of the story (Pp 63, 108, 161) like "puerile," "parturient" and "sobriquet" and, in the dialogue between (young, conservative) Mary and her recent-college-graduate assistants (which took place in the 1950s), she refers to them as (p 197) "virgin newbies." He also dreams up similes, (p 103) "She fell [in love] hard, like a drydocked ship's anchor hitting cement," when not necessary and sometimes simply tries too hard, (p 104) "Now, deceived by insincerity, duped by counterfeit promises, and impregnated by the sperm cells of deception, Mary was more alone than ever." Worst of the book: the writing and format. Best: the banter between Mary and the assistants who help her design the rocket fuel mixture and the historical information about von Braun and Korolov (about whom the author inspired me to want to learn more). I'm glad that Mr. Morgan put in the effort to get his mother's story out to the masses (I'd have liked to have seen the play). I just wish he'd done so in a more reader-friendly format. Maybe a short essay? Better: Jeannette Walls' Half Broke Horses, Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, Jr., and Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

When Mary Sherman died, her son compiled an obituary that outlined what he knew of her accomplishments although she had been utterly reticent about her classified work on the aerospace program. The LA Times refused to print it because they couldn't verify the facts. At the funeral an elderly former coworker came up to him and said, "Your mom singlehandedly saved the US Space Program and no-one knows about except a handful of dying old men like me. You have to tell her story." His response was to research a woman who had tried to erase all traces of herself, from childhood photos (her mother did not abide photographs) to all traces of her novel rocket fuel that brought Werner Von Braun's rocket design from not capable of achieving orbit to success. A girl from the North Dakota plains whose parents were forced to allow her to attend school and would not allow her to do homework when farm chores were to be done, who ran away from home in the dead of night to attend college, and who was unable to complete her engineering degree, she was pressed into munitions work during the war and went onto become perhaps the leading rocket fuel expert in the world.

The book is fascinating, well-written and upsets what we know of this part of history. The self-effacing attitude she took allowed male coworkers to try to take credit for her discoveries. I highly recommend the book.

It is always interesting when a new historical figure emerges, especially when it is an individual like Mary Sherman Morgan, who rose above cultural barriers to achieve success in a given field. Mary's story is also interesting in that one can't say for sure that she would have been forgotten by history if she had not kept secrets and even basic information about her life to herself and husband. The book makes a valid case that she suffered from OCD, and that her hard life growing up had an adverse affect on her ability to really embrace people. It also briefly suggests that these problem may have contributed to her leaving work at NAA, particularly when coupled with her desire to raise her family.

Larger point being -- can one blame history for forgetting a person who seemed to want to be forgotten? A lot of this book is the author -- Mary's son -- attempting to spin a lengthier story out of the scant amount of information he actually uncovered about his mother, but he never hides the fact that despite all of his efforts, time had erased a lot of people and physical records that would have helped him develop a more well-rounded biography. The only moments of indignation occur when he discovers that a co-worker and credit-grabber Mary worked with attempted to take credit for her work.

This volume found its roots when the author created a play based on his mother's accomplishment. I hope that the story finds its way to the silver screen. In a film production, it is easier to overlook liberties taken for dialogue creation and story development. At times, in the book "Rocket Girl," these things are distracting. I occasionally wondered if the story of Mary Sherman Morgan would have been better delivered in a lengthy magazine article in a publication like Smithsonian where less embellishment would be needed to meet a word or page count.

However, the author was unable to get his mother's obituary published in a prominent newspaper because of a lack (at that time) of documentation related to her work. It may have been easier to find a publisher for this manuscript than to arm-wrestle with a magazine for a feature story. Hopefully, this book will help more details about Mary's life and professional career emerge with magazine articles and internet news stories to follow.

I am ashamed to give this book only four stars. "Rocket Girl" weaves multiple histories with one another--the main story is a reconstruction of the life of Mary Sherman Morgan by her son George. George is from my generation.
Mary Sherman Morgan is but one notable woman of her era. Had it not been for a concerned social worker, little Mary wouldn't have attended school at all. That was just one instance of serendipity. Two wars, one hot and one cold, served to break gender barriers. Mary Sherman wouldn't have been hired as a chemist if not for World War Two and a severe brain shortage. The Cold War was fought by magicians, only erupting in fire on the periphery--the predicted thermonuclear exchange between the two superpowers didn't happen.
There are thousands (if not millions) of other notable women who are lost to history during the last century. That's why it is HIS-story, and not HER-story. As late as the 1960's it was a man's world in the United States.
George Morgan's book brings to light the story of a remarkable woman. George admits that his book is imperfect, but hopefully this book will bring other women's histories to light. Thank you, George.

Terrific story about a remarkable woman. This well written story kept me interested from beginning to end, I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of space travel. A remarkable woman indeed.

I was completely bowled over by this story. I was in high school when the Russians launched Sputnik. I vividly remember how everyone in our country was blindsided by this stupendous event. This was during the height of the Cold War, so when we finally successfully launched our own satellite, we felt vindicated. I also remember the immense push to revamp our education system to prepare students to study mathematics and science. I just wish that the power-wielders of the era as well as Mary Sherman Morgan herself, would have shone a spotlight on her immense accomplishment, which might have helped to end discrimination against women even earlier. Not that said discrimination is over, far from it. To think that she accomplished all she did in spite of her decidedly unenlightened family makes her story even more amazing. I also think that her son and biographer is an exemplary person in that he tells the whole story of Mary Sherman Morgan, thus exposing what is usually kept under wraps regarding women's lives, and also the fact that he survived intact in spite of his mother's inability to relate to him and his brother. I believe that she suffered from a type of mental disorder, perhaps a form of what today might be described as Asberger's, mild form of autism. Even today, we are in the dark ages when it comes to understanding the causes and treatment of these perplexing neurological disorders. I highly recommend this book to all.

As historical fiction, Rocket Girl, has enough truth to be compelling and enough fiction to be a delightful read. Woman in the 40's and 50's suffered a support system for everything except keeping house and raising children, so it is critical and important to be reminded of those unnamed heroes that had minds and used them productively. Mary Sherman Morgan was brilliant and hard working. But not only did she hold down a prestigious job she also raised a family. Like Ginger Rogers she did everything Fred Astaire did just backwards and in high heels. What sets Mary apart from most engineers however cannot be overlooked or over simplified because it is the crux of her greatness. She was a creative thinker not bound by linear thinking but worked the problem not the tried and true route that was presented to her to solve. Innovative, decisive and experienced she persevered and triumphed. What a woman!

The comments about Morgan's writing style are right on -- he does jumble things a bit and it is a little weird to move from Mary's "brain" to Morgan's brain -- and he writes his bits in the present tense, which is also jarring.

If you ignore the writing and focus on Mary's story, you'll get a good read about self-determination -- and about how genius is oblivious to gender, nationality or circumstance. I enjoyed learning about the rocket program and Mary's part in it. I read the book in a few sittings, so an easy read.

The book, however, left more questions than it answered with regard to what happened to her after she left her job.

I do not have the aptitude for a career in science. It is neat to read a biography about a person who does though. Mary Sherman Morgan invented the rocket propellant called hydyne in 1958. Her invention helped launch America's first satelite and rocket. Her invention did not have a long lasting impact in rocket science, but it established the contest between the United States and Russia in the space race in the 1950's and beyond. Mary Sherman also tested nitric acid, which is the main ingredient in the composition of dynamite. Her weapons helped American soldiers win World War II. I admire Mary Sherman Morgan. She experienced prejudiced attitudes by men who thought that a woman could not succeed in science. She possessed an obsessive curiosity about science. I learned that one of the challenges that a chemical scientist faces is trying to figure out which chemicals match together to create the desired outcome. This book makes me think about the every day application of chemistry. There is an example of how chemistry happens every time a person drives a car. The author of this book is Mary's son George. I like reading the things he learned about his mother while doing the research. She became a rocket chemist after completing high school and two semesters of college. I have never heard of a person with this level of intelligence. People like Mary Morgan remind me that I can learn more outside of a class room than in one. I just need to have an open mind to try new things. I love this book.

I find it contemptible that author shows so little respect for the subject of his book, his mother, that he disparaged her Catholic beliefs (Page 13). He speaks of her eulogy: "It was pretty normal stuff as eulogies go - lots of talk about Jesus, the resurrection, heaven. Blah, blah, blah." The author calls her a devout Catholic but fails to show any respect for her devotion.

I enjoyed reading this account of a man’s desire to really know his mother and understand her part in the space legacy. Watching the parallel tracks of scientists as they conducted the space race was really interesting. Some poetic license was defiantly used, but it helped tell the story in a creative way and kept it from turning into a dry biography.

Rocket Girl is the story of Mary Sherman Morgan, whose obscure but crucial contribution in the creation of a new rocket fuel, likely saved the nascent American space program in the late 1950s. The story is as much about her son's quest for the full story of hi mother who, being reticent to beat her own drum, did not talk very much about what she did. A great story for anyone interested in the history of the space program.

This book promises to be a biography of the author's mother, who invented the rocket fuel that launched America's first satellite. As a female engineer in the space industry, that story intrigued me enough to read and review the book. It is partially that story. It's also partially a biography of Wernher von Braun (German rocketry father), Sergei Korolev (Russian rocketry father), and the author himself (a sometime creative writer and playwright). And they're all jumbled up. Mostly it's roughly chronological, but not always, and the most of the bits about the author are interspersed almost randomly as both flashbacks from his childhood and anecdotes from his modern day book research.

Most of the author's own bits could be removed and the book thereby be improved. The historical bits suffer from overly flowery, blatantly made-up, theatrical-sounding scenes to tell the stories of the various key characters (I'd class them as historical fiction) plus some from other characters who were only incidental to the story, and some bouncing around in location and topic. The discussions of outright scientific topics felt forced and made it obvious they're not the author's forte. I wanted more on the author's mother and less about von Braun and Korolev. I also didn't want the latter two to be in the same narrative voice as the mom stories; they should have been little more than touchstone references to the mood and surrounding events important to the story. I wanted a little more discussion about the evolution of the the industry to include more women. Even if there wasn't more on Mom to be written, the book could have stood being about 1/3 shorter, if not 1/2 the length.

All that said, the book was mildly interesting, enough for me to give it an OK rating. I just wish an editor had been much more assertive at cutting the fluff.

I read the book in one day because I couldn't put it down! The narrative style was engaging. I appreciated the way the author tied the past to the present.

I only wish it were LONGER, and spoke more about how/if she pined for her glory days once she was stuck in the kitchen. I imagine a woman like her would resent her children for taking her away from her profession, but the only hint we were given was how she liked babies but not children.

Engaging, easy read for all ages. Highly recommended.

Wonderful story of how a girl from a poor, abusive family in rural America grows up to be a rocket scientist. The author is Mary's oldest son. This book was frustrating to read because at times it was a biography and at other times it was a history of early rocket science.

This would be a no star review from me except for two things. First women's studies is my passion and it is difficult to disregard any history of women's achievements. Second, the author is competent at explaining rocket propulsion to the lay reader.

George Morgan wrote this book after having written a play based on the same material. It is about his mother's gift for science and role in the early development of rocket fuel. Mr. Morgan is a playwright. The desire to create excitement in the text shows in the florid prose and unbelievable dialogue in the book.

Mr. Morgan brings his childhood angst to this book in an uncomfortable way. It makes this feel like a vanity press publication meant only for relatives and friends. The book is cut between Mr. Morgan's quest to find out about his mother, the life of Wernher Von Braun, Mary Sherman Morgan herself and side notes about unwed motherhood, hoarding and OCD.

I disliked the construction of the information of the book, the obviously fictionalized dialogue as well as the author's self pity regarding his childhood. I was embarrassed to read about his trip in a VW as a baby as well as his longing for more motherly affection. That would be a different book and one I would not choose to read. I also found the forward by Ashley Stroupe ignorant of the gains made by women who did stand up and confront the establishment.

I was very disappointed in the quality and content of this book. Mary Sherman Morgan deserved better. I cannot in good conscience recommend this book.

I read the book in one day because I couldn't put it down! The narrative style was engaging. I appreciated the way the author tied the past to the present.

I only wish it were LONGER, and spoke more about how/if she pined for her glory days once she was stuck in the kitchen. I imagine a woman like her would resent her children for taking her away from her profession, but the only hint we were given was how she liked babies but not children.

Engaging, easy read for all ages. Highly recommended.

Wonderful story of how a girl from a poor, abusive family in rural America grows up to be a rocket scientist. The author is Mary's oldest son. This book was frustrating to read because at times it was a biography and at other times it was a history of early rocket science.

This would be a no star review from me except for two things. First women's studies is my passion and it is difficult to disregard any history of women's achievements. Second, the author is competent at explaining rocket propulsion to the lay reader.

George Morgan wrote this book after having written a play based on the same material. It is about his mother's gift for science and role in the early development of rocket fuel. Mr. Morgan is a playwright. The desire to create excitement in the text shows in the florid prose and unbelievable dialogue in the book.

Mr. Morgan brings his childhood angst to this book in an uncomfortable way. It makes this feel like a vanity press publication meant only for relatives and friends. The book is cut between Mr. Morgan's quest to find out about his mother, the life of Wernher Von Braun, Mary Sherman Morgan herself and side notes about unwed motherhood, hoarding and OCD.

I disliked the construction of the information of the book, the obviously fictionalized dialogue as well as the author's self pity regarding his childhood. I was embarrassed to read about his trip in a VW as a baby as well as his longing for more motherly affection. That would be a different book and one I would not choose to read. I also found the forward by Ashley Stroupe ignorant of the gains made by women who did stand up and confront the establishment.

I was very disappointed in the quality and content of this book. Mary Sherman Morgan deserved better. I cannot in good conscience recommend this book.

This must be made as a film! The story of Mary Sherman Morgan should be put to screen. Her story is so vital to the history of the space race, and the country as a whole. What an inspiration for female scientists! It is important for her story to be told to herald her role in history. Claire Danes should portray her.

Interesting Story
I wondered how the book contained so many details because the writer portrayed his mother to be a master of secrecy. At the end the writer explains that the story is historical fiction. I was a bit disappointed to hear that. Writing is just ok. Perhaps this book would be enjoyed by a young girl. It is easy to read and could be inspirational for a younger person.

I own auto/biographies of almost all the men who have walked on the moon. I own auto/biographies of many of the people who made this happen including NASA Flight Directors, scientists, and men from industry who built the rockets and moon vehicles. I'm also an engineer so technical history books intrigue me. As such, I was eager to read the book "Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist" which is billed as the "personal history and historic events" of Mrs Morgan's early life and professional career. I also looked forward to hearing about the contributions that our many many female engineers and scientists made to our country's space exploration history. However, I was left greatly wanting - mostly trying to decipher which of the book was fact and which was the concoction of author George D. Morgan's imagination.

From Mason's foreword, we learn that in an attempt "to get the word out about his mother's contribution to the space program", he wrote a play that ran at the California Institute of Technology. A noble cause, but obviously you would expect a play to include glorified or fictional accounts in order to make it more enjoyable to the audience. You do not, however, expect that from a book which is billed as a "personal history with historic events". Although there is an Endnote section, most of the verifiable notes are from books on Wernher Von Braun. Those notes that DO pertain to Mrs. Morgan are either miscellaneous trivialities (such as the author stating that he has his mother's birth and death certificates) or from questionable sources (including the RAMPANT use of Wikipedia as the author's primary source) which could only lead me to the clearer and clearer conclusion that the book was predominantly a fictionalized narrative sprinkled in with what little actual facts the author could glean from interviews with Mrs. Morgan's co-workers. The sections of the book Mrs. Morgan's formative years were among the worst examples of this as the author has actually sprinkled in dialogue, which can only have been dreamed up by the author, to punch up what was obviously a dark portion of Mrs. Morgan's past that the author himself admits his family knows almost nothing about. This is not a historical narrative.

Even when the author attempts to sprinkle in actual facts, he has it wrong. He talks about an episode in Mrs. Morgan's early childhood where there is deep mud in November in Ray, ND. The author has obviously NEVER been to North Dakota in November or he'd have known there would have probably been a foot of snow and not mud deep enough to swallow a car (I lived there for three - long, cold - years. Even throwaway, "see how smart I am", comments are not 100% correct. The author states that "North American Aviation (was) the forerunner of Rocketdyne". This is sort of true in VERY simplistic, child-like terms. North American (NAA) spun off Rocketdyne in the 50's as a wholly-owned subsidiary (as anyone who has known anything about aerospace history knows that North American did more than just make rocket fuel). Later both would be merged with Rockwell to form (eventually) Rockwell International in the late 60's. Today, Rocketdyne is part of Pratt & Whitney. I go through these two specific examples to highlight the major failing of the book - even the author's truths aren't truths. And there are many MANY many more examples - so many I stopped notating them in my copy of the book.

However, by far the most egregious example of the book's short-comings was the author's intellectual dishonesty of linking Mrs. Morgan's career with that of Von Braun. I'm sorry, but this basically amounts to the Sesame Street television game "Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Other?" Yes, Mrs. Morgan made a significant contribution to the Jupiter-C/Juno/Redstone rocket family by being the lead scientist in the development of the Hydyne fuel that powered SOME of these rockets. However, it was a technological dead end and thus a stop-gap footnote in history. Equating Mrs. Morgan's small, albeit necessary, role in the advance of the US rocketry industry to all that was Wernher Von Braun (good, bad, and otherwise) is beyond laughable. There are thousands of inventors in our past and present who made notable, albeit temporary, additions to science. There are also thousands of inventors whose additions are largely forgotten due to their invention being a technological deadend - Mrs. Morgan is just a female example of that. No better, no worse. Not everyone can be an Otis, Bell, or Ford, or on the female side, Virginia Apgar, Bette Nesmith, Ruth Handler, or Stephanie Kwolek.

Bottomline for me on this book, was that I really struggled with what to believe and what not to believe that's a crying shame. Mrs. Morgan obviously was an extremely intelligent individual and her story deserves to be told. However, the fairy tale narrative only serves to drag the real life picture down and truly ruin the book. There are whole chapters here that should probably be tossed as being inconsequential to the overall narrative, blatant fantasy, or both. However, I think the author would be left with too few pages for an actual, no kidding, book and maybe THAT is the real story... If you want to write a fictional play about your mom in order to drum up interest - that's great and I applaud you. However, don't then turn around and repackage your play as some type of historically accurate treatise on the history of aerospace and the (tenuously far-fetched) connections between your mom and one of the luminaries of US Space Program history.

Everyone involved has a piece in truly historic events. However, not everyone can be a Washington, or a Lindberg, or a Patton, or a Kennedy, or a Von Braun. Even the lowly buck private serving chow in the mess had a part in the victory in Europe (an army lives on its stomach), but this private isn't saying he made D-Day a success or likening his endeavors to Eisenhower. Sy Liebergot made a truly notable impact on the space program when he was a part of the team that helped the Apollo 13 crew limp home, but he isn't running around the country saying that he was as important during the crisis as Flight Director Gene Kranz or astronauts Lovell, Swigert and Haise. Everyone carrying the spear has an impact in ensuring that the tip is driven home on target. There is no shame in saying you were part of the "cast of thousands". However, the author's implication that her career was more than it actually was is just kidding himself and lying to your readers.