Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam
Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

Rocket Boys
A Memoir

Author: Homer Hickam

Narrator: Beau Bridges

Abridged: 4 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/01/1998


Synopsis

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown 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....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 hardscrabble little company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high-school football. The son of the mine's superintendent and a mother determined to push her son to a better life, Sonny fell in with a group of misfits for whom the future looked uncertain. But in 1957, after watching the Soviet Satellite Sputnik streak across the sky, Sonny and his teenage friends took their future into their own hands, changing their lives and their town forever.
Looking back after a distinguished NASA career that fulfilled his boyhood ambition, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking listeners into the life of the little mining town and the boys who came to embody both its tensions and its dreams. With the help -- and sometimes hindrance -- of the people of Coalwood, the Rocket Boys learn not only how to turn mine scraps into rockets that soar miles into the heavens, but how to find hope in a town that progress is passing by.
In this uniquely American memoir, Homer Hickam beautifully captures a moment when a dying town, a divided family, and a band of teenage dreamers dared to set their sights on the stars -- and saw a future that the nation was just beginning to imagine.

About Homer Hickam

Homer H. Hickam Jr. is the author of the bestselling The Keeper's Son and many other books, including The Coalwood Way and Sky of Stone. He and his wife and cats share their time between homes in Huntsville, Alabama, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.


Reviews

Goodreads review by J on August 11, 2018

Perfect afterword Good follow up to a book and movie I loved. Also got me interested in other titles by the same author......more

Goodreads review by Anjana on May 30, 2018

[URL not allowed]......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on September 16, 2022

I don't think any other story has ever inspired me like Homer Hickam's. I remember seeing the movie October Sky as a kid at the drive-in theatre with my parents. I remember reading Rocket Boys in high school. Homer Hickam was born and raised in Coalwood, West Virginia, a town built for the express p......more

Goodreads review by Svetlana on November 28, 2018

This October I was given this class assignment to read "October Sky". At first, I had my doubts about the book and found it very boring and dreadful in the beginning, but I continued and read the whole book with ease. If you pick up this book on the bookshelves, I recommend you don't give up on it.......more

Goodreads review by Bob on February 04, 2022

An embarrassment of riches … and humility I’ve always thought it unfair that the mysterious lord of the universe gifts a few with multiple talents while many of us soldier on with limited skills. Homer Hicham is a member in good standing of the first group - a NASA engineer, rocket builder and scuba......more