Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam - 1998

New York: Delacorte Press, 1998. SIGNED. Purchased New. NF/F. 1st/1st. Twenty-second printing with number line ending with 22. Signed "Aim High! Homer Hickam" on the title page. The unread book is tight and square with solid hinges and binding and good tips. Light crease to top back board near the corner and tiny smudge to front cover. The textblock is clean with no writing, bookplate, or markings and not BCE, ex-library, or remaindered. Black and white photos. The dust jacket is unclipped ($28.00) and Fine. Protected in a new Brodart Mylar cover. 368 pages. 5½ x 8½" tall.

Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr.'s shares the story of his youth and an extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia - a hard-scrabble little mining company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football and where the future was regarded with more fear than hope.

In 1957 a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik shoot across the Appalachian sky and soon found his future in the stars. 'Sonny' and a handful of his friends, Roy Lee Cook, Sherman O'Dell, and Quentin Wilson were inspired to start designing and launching the homemade rockets that would change their lives forever.

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.