By Homer Hickman
Rating: 8/10
A first person account
Rocket Boys
I saw the movie when it came out. It is called “October Sky”. It was inspirational, emotional and an enjoyable movie to watch. A coming of age film about a young man and his desire to build rockets. I picked up the book several years later and it sat on my bookshelf for another several years. I came across it about a month ago prior to a yard sale and instead of selling it I stuffed it into my over crowded briefcase. I would pull it out every time I went to have Sushi for lunch or even if I sat in my office and ate a sandwich. Soon I was half way through. Soon I was feeling like a teenager in a coal mining town in West Virginia in the 60s. A time and place where a career in football or a career in science was the only way out of a dead-end town. I don’t have a lot of biographies on my book shelf and I’m proud to have this one.
Yes, its a bio (or memoir) of a the author, Homer Hickman, Jr. But the biography gets hidden in the story about his life and his success and failures as a rocket builder. Aided only by a Calculus class and a “rocket book” given to him by his teacher, Homer and his friends tried and tested different mixtures for fuel, different shapes for nozzles, and overcame obstacles of no-material, negativity from their own teachers and Homer’s father, and the difficulties of having a dream and pursing it.
I could not put this book down for the last 150 pages and read through like a madman.
The book is fulfilling in every sense. Told from the perspective of a small town boy’s point of view. Sonny Hickman shares with us his teenage romantic desires, his differences with his father, his understanding mother, how he overcame the bully down the street and his ultimate pursuit of getting out of town or good as a rocket scientist.
Homer wraps up the book with an update of what happened to who. From the teacher that inspired him to the death of his father.
I enjoyed the book immensely. Anyone who likes a little bit of American history, coming of age stories and a well written book about an American dream will love this book.
Book Reviews from Amazon:Amazon.com
Inspired by Werner von Braun and his Cape Canaveral team, 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided in 1957 to build his own rockets. They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, a mining town that everyone knew was dying–everyone except Sonny’s father, the mine superintendent and a company man so dedicated that his family rarely saw him. Hickam’s smart, iconoclastic mother wanted her son to become something more than a miner and, along with a female science teacher, encouraged the efforts of his grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency. He grew up to be a NASA engineer and his memoir of the bumpy ride toward a gold medal at the National Science Fair in 1960–an unprecedented honor for a miner’s kid–is rich in humor as well as warm sentiment. Hickam vividly evokes a world of close communal ties in which a storekeeper who sold him saltpeter warned, “Listen, rocket boy. This stuff can blow you to kingdom come.” Hickam is candid about the deep disagreements and tensions in his parents’ marriage, even as he movingly depicts their quiet loyalty to each other. The portrait of his ultimately successful campaign to win his aloof father’s respect is equally affecting. –Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
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… read moreBook Description
“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
