ISBN: 0440235502 9780440235507

Category: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs

Page count: 448

<b>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER • The “nostalgic and entertaining memoir” (<i>People</i>), originally published as <i>Rocket Boys</i>, that inspired the Universal Pictures film.</b><br><br><b>“A message of hope in an age of cynicism. . . . Perhaps we all have something to learn from a half-dozen boys who dared to reject all limitations . . . and resolved to send dreams roaring to the sky.”—<i>The San Diego Union-Tribune</i></b><br><b> </b><br>It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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, <i>October Sky</i> 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.