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Rocket Boys: A Memoir cover

Rocket Boys: A Memoir

Homer H. Hickman Jr.

0

awards won

4

score

#2314 of 3,809 books · #837 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1998).

Rocket Boys won the #1 New York Times bestseller ranking and was the inspiration for the film October Sky. It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying. Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: to send rockets into outer space. The introspective son of the mine's superintendent and a mother determined to get him out of Coalwood forever, Homer fell in with a group of misfits who learned not only how to turn scraps of metal into sophisticated rockets but how to sustain their hope in a town that swallowed its men alive. As the boys began to light up the tarry skies with their flaming projectiles and dreams of glory, Coalwood, and the Hickams, would never be the same. With the grace of a natural storyteller, NASA engineer Homer Hickam paints a warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible. Lush and lyrical, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir: A powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the end of the 1950s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, and of growing up and getting out.

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Publisher
Delta
ISBN-13
9780385333214
Topics
Coming of ageRocketry and space raceCoal mining town life

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