Rocket Boys: A Memoir (aka October Sky) »

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.

Captivated by the miracle of the first space flights, the young Homer Hickam and his friends started playing with and daydreaming about rockets. As an adult, Hickam would make rockets as an engineer at NASA. Rocket Boys ,is a touching memoir of the birth of the space age and of one man living his dream by finding his place in that great adventure.

Stephen Blanchard

Rocket Boys is sometimes an uncomfortable blend of fiction and faction, but the real weight of the book lies not with Homer's struggle for altitude, interesting though it is, but in his awkward love for his father and for Coalwood, with its doomed mines and railyards. -- Literary Review