This the touching and inspiring true story of a group of boys growing up in the mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia. The launch of Sputnik in the 1950s ignited their imaginations and they began building rockets with the encouragement of supportive teachers and helpful miners, who offered scrap materials. Readers will laugh and cry as Homer comes to terms with his relationships with his family and achieves success no one in Coalwood dared hope for. In a town dependent on dwindling coal resources, the Rocket Boys allow Coalwood to invest in a different resource: the intelligence and enthusiasm of their young people. This trade paperback is the latest edition of Rocket Boys, and contains eight new pages of vintage photographs of Homer, his buddies, and Coalwood.
The #1 New York Times best selling memoir that inspired the film October Sky, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir-a powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the dawn of the 1960s, of a mother’s love and a father’s fears, of a group of young men who dreamed of launching rockets into outer space . . . and who made those dreams come true.
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, even in a company town that swallowed its men alive. A story of romance and loss, of growing up and getting out, Homer Hickam’s lush, lyrical memoir is a chronicle of triumph-at once exquisitely written and marvelously entertaining.
Now with 8 pages of photographs.
A number-one New York Times bestseller in mass market, brought to the screen in the acclaimed film October Sky, Homer Hickam’s memoir, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, comes to trade paperback with an all-new photo insert.
One of the most beloved bestsellers in recent years, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir. A powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the end of the 1950s, it is the story of a mother’s love and a father’s fears, of growing up and getting out. With the grace of a natural storyteller, Homer Hickam looks back after a distinguished NASA career to tell his own true story of growing up in a dying coal town and of how, against the odds, he made his dreams of launching rockets into outer space come true.
A story of romance and loss and a keen portrait of life at an extraordinary point in American history, Rocket Boys is a chronicle of triumph.
About the author:
Homer H. Hickam, Jr., 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 Smithsonian Air and Space and American History Illustrated, he is a NASA payload training manager for the International Space Program and lives in Huntsville, Alabama.
