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ONLINE LISTING TITLE: SIGNED HOMER HICKAM Rocket Boys A Memoir NASA
Sputnik AEROSPACE Space Flight
FULL
BOOK TITLE: ROCKET BOYS: A
Memoir
AUTHOR(S): Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
SIGNED by AUTHOR? YES
INSCRIBED by
AUTHOR? Yes,
please see photos
TRUE
First Edition and First Printing? This is the third printing of the first edition.
(Be wary of books offered
as First Editions. Ask the seller if the book meets the strict
"Guide to Identification of First Editions"
criteria.)
ISBN: 038533320X
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1998
Book & Dust Jacket Condition
Definitions:
New - Unread in perfect condition.
Fine - Almost New, but not crisp.
Very Good - Small signs of wear.
Good - Average used book.
BOOK
CONDITION: Near-Fine
DUST JACKET CONDITION: Near Fine. Protected in clear book
sleeve.
PRICE-CLIPPED DUST JACKET? Is price-clipped.
PUBLISHER: Delacorte Press
BOOK IS
SQUARE, SOLID, CLEAN, AND TIGHT.
THIS IS NOT A
REMAINDER.
THE DETAILS:
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. 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
marvelously entertaining, 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 introspective second
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 Appalachian 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 readers 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 mining scraps into rockets that sore miles into the heavens, but how to
find hope in a town that progress is passing by.
A uniquely American memoir, Rocket Boys is at
once an aspiring chronicle of triumph and a luminous story of a mother's love,
a father's fears, and a young man's coming of age. With the effortless grace of
a natural storyteller, Homer Hickam beautifully captures a moment when a dying
town, a divided family, and a band of teenage dreamers dared to look beyond
their differences and set their sights on the stars -- and saw a future that
the nation was just beginning to imagine.
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
Smithsonian Air and Space and American History Illustrated, he is a retired
NASA engineer, consults on aerospace projects that interest him, and lives in
Huntsville, Alabama.
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On Jul-18-12 at 03:27:14 PDT, seller added the following information: