Hickam, Homer H., Jr. - Rocket Boys

[oyceter]

I ended up bringing this on the airplane, thanks to jonquil's enthusiastic rec.

Homer Hickam, Jr., called Sonny, grew up in Coalwood, West Virginia. The town was basically owned and run by the coal company, and Sonny's dad was a company man in pretty much every way you can be. But by the 1960s, most people, Sonny's mother included, knew that the town probably didn't have much of a future and that the company would pull out soon. There's a sense of desperation underlying a lot of the book, of people trying to get out.

Sonny eventually tries to get out by building rockets with a few of his friends.

This sounds like it should be an incredibly depressing book, but it's actually not. Sonny's dad is rather leery of the rockets and of most of the town, given that he seems to be the only person who doesn't think Coalwood is dying. But Sonny's mom and the rest of Coalwood take such hope from watching the boys build rockets that it ends up being rather happy.

Also, it's really very cool, just thinking about how much BCMA (the name of the rocket-building club) manages to accomplish in a few years. Sonny and friends have to figure out the best rocket fuel and how to assemble it from the ground up, they have to engineer the shapes of the rockets, and eventually, they have to figure out how high their rockets are flying. They go from accidentally blowing up rose garden fences to shooting rockets thousands of feet into the air to winning the National Science Fair, all with almost no knowledge of rockets or mechanical and aerospace engineering.

I mean... Sonny taught himself calculus to figure out the best shape for rocket nozzles!

That's just cool.

Anyway, highly recommended. It sounds like such a dull topic, but Hickam writes well, and in a way that really undersells what he and his friends were doing at the time, allowing the reader to come to her own conclusions.

And I nearly died laughing at the assorted rocket escapades, particularly when wasp nests were involved.