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Summary
Summary
"Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my home town was at war with itself over its children, and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine."
So begins Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr.'s extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia-a hard-scrabble little company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football. But in 1957, after the Soviet satellite Sputnik shot across the Appalachian sky, Sonny and his teenaged friends decided to do their bit for the U.S. space race by building their own rockets--and Coalwood, Sonny and A powerful story of growing up and of getting out, of a mother's love and a father's fears, Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys proves, like Angela's Ashes and Russell Baker's Growing Up before it, that the right storyteller and the right story can touch readers' hearts and enchant their souls.
In a town where the only things that mattered were coal-mining and high-school football, where the future was regarded with more fear than hope, a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik race across the West Virginia sky--and soon found his future in the stars. In 1957, Homer H. "Sonny" Hickam, Jr., and a handful of his friends were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives and their town forever.
Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams. Step by step, with the help (and occasional hindrance) of a collection of unforgettable characters, the boys learn not only how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that fly miles into the sky, but how to sustain their dreams as they dared to imagine a life beyond its borders in a town that the postwar boom was passing by.
Rocket Boys has already caught the eye of Hollywood: The producer of Field of Dreams is now working to produce a major motion picture in time for next year's Academy Awards.
A uniquely endearing story with universal themes of class, family, coming of age, and the thrill of discovery, Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys is evocative, vivid storytelling at its most magical.
Author Notes
Homer Hickam was born and raised in Coalwood, West Virginia. The author of Torpedo Junction (a Military History Book-of-the-Month Club selection) as well as numerous articles for such publications as Air & Space/Smithsonian and American History Illustrated , he is a NASA payload training manager for the International Space Station program and lives in Huntsville, Alabama.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Great memoirs must balance the universal and the particular. Too much of the former makes it overly familiar; too much of the latter makes readers ask what the story has to do with them. In his debut, Hickam, a retired NASA engineer, walks that line beautifully. On one level, it's the story of a teenage boy who learns about dedication, responsibility, thermodynamics and girls. On the other hand, it's about a dying way of life in a coal town where the days are determined by the rhythms of the mine and the company that controls everything and everybody. Hickam's father is Coalwood, W.Va.'s mine superintendent, whose devotion to the mine is matched only by his wife's loathing for it. When Sputnik inspires "Sonny" with an interest in rockets, she sees it not as a hobby but as a way to escape the mines. After an initial, destructive try involving 12 cherry bombs, Sonny and his cronies set up the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA). From Auk I (top altitude, six feet), through Auk XXXI (top altitude, 31,000 feet), the boys experiment with nozzles, fins and, most of all, fuel, graduating from a basic black powder to "rocket candy" (melted potassium chlorate and sugar) to "Zincoshine" (zinc, sulfur, moonshine). But Coalwood is the real star, here. Teachers, clergy, machinists, town gossips, union, management, everyone become co-conspirators in the BCMA's explosive three-year project. Hickam admits to taking poetic license in combining characters and with the sequence of events, and if there is any flaw, it's that the people and the narrative seem a little too perfect. But no matter how jaded readers have become by the onslaught of memoirs, none will want to miss the fantastic voyage of BCMA, Auk and Coalwood. First serial to Life. 10-city author tour. (Sept.) FYI: Rocket Boys is currently in production at Universal, which plans to release it later this year. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This straightforward, un-self-conscious memoir is set in Coalwood, W. Va., where the author was 14 years old in 1957, the son of the local mine superintendent. Hickam divides his life in West Virginia into two phasesbefore and after the October 1957 launching of the Soviet Sputnik satellite. Hickam Sr., a straight company man, despised the Russian Communists and saw his budding scientist son as a future mining engineer, but his son had other plans. After reading all about rockets in Life magazine, Homer Jr., a disciple of the esteemed US engineer and Cape Canaveral team leader Wernher von Braun, decided to build a rocket of his own. Hickam satisfies in his characterization of his rocketeer cohorts, including the brains behind the operation, the school nerd, whose jet-black hair ``looked as if it had been plastered down with about a quart of Wildroot Cream Oil.'' After several mishaps in town with their dangerous steel missile projectiles, the boys set up a rocket center on an old dump site and called it Cape Coalwood, complete with a cement launch pad and a ``blockhouse,'' or building for the rocketeers projection, made of scavenged wood and tin. The author and his friends are adept at breaking things, including his mother's rose garden fence and bathroom scale, but when they break the one-mile barrier in their launches, the entire town has to take them seriously. Hickam admits in an author's note to having used a certain license in telling his story. This seems evident in its idealization of his mother and her near-religious insistence that her son not follow her husband into the mines. A simple small-town story of larger-than-life dreams, in the vein of Rinker Buck's recent coming-of-age adventure, Flight of Passage (1997). Heavy on '50s nostalgia, invoking song lyrics throughout and portraying the era's inhibition of sexual relations among young people. (First serial to Life; film rights to Universal; Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Booklist Review
In 1957, the national panic set off by Sputnik I reached into the hollows of Coalwood, West Virginia, the setting for this affecting story. The second son of a coal mine's manager, teenage Homer went bonkers about rockets, listening to Sputnik I's beep, watching it streak across the night sky, and yearning to work for Wernher von Braun. So he formed a rocket club, whose adventures in launching the Auk series of rockets, from their first attempt that burned up Mom's fence to the last that flew six miles up, form the frame of the memoir. The content comes from the conflict and gossip generated by his rocket compadres' activities, and if dialogue is remembered suspiciously accurately and entrances and exits occur with too dramatically effective timing, the narrative still rings true. Hickam's profiles of Coalwood's people (some, he admits, are composites) invite cheers and boos: boos for brother Jim and his thick-browed gridiron buddies, always threatening to pound on Sonny and his four-eyed friends; cheers for rocketeer Quentin, surely a composite geek from central casting whose word of approval is prodigious. Even if Hickam stretched the strict truth to metamorphose his memories into Stand by Melike material for Hollywood (and a movie has been made, with release set for late this year), the embellishing only converts what is a good story into an absorbing, rapidly readable one that is unsentimental but artful about adolescence, high school, and family life. Could generate intense interest. --Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal Review
Hickam recalls his distinguished NASA career, which all started when he saw Sputnik as a little boy and began designing and launching homemade rockets. With a ten-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
1. Coalwood | p. 1 |
2. Sputnik | p. 15 |
3. Mom | p. 39 |
4. The Football Fathers | p. 47 |
5. Quentin | p. 61 |
6. Mr. Bykovski | p. 75 |
7. Cape Coalwood | p. 95 |
8. Construction of the Cape | p. 109 |
9. Jake Mosby | p. 121 |
10. Miss Riley | p. 139 |
11. Rocket Candy | p. 159 |
12. The Machinists | p. 177 |
13. The Rocket Book | p. 193 |
14. The Pillar Explosion | p. 211 |
15. The State Troopers | p. 219 |
16. A Natural Arrogance | p. 227 |
17. Valentine | p. 235 |
18. The Bump | p. 243 |
19. Picking Up and Going On | p. 251 |
20. O'Dell's Treasure | p. 259 |
21. Zincoshine | p. 269 |
22. We Do the Math | p. 289 |
23. Science Fairs | p. 309 |
24. A Suit for Indianapolis | p. 331 |
25. The National Science Fair | p. 339 |
26. All Systems Go | p. 351 |
Epilogue | p. 363 |