The next meeting of the CFC Book Group will take place on January 15 at 1:30 in the church library. We will be reading Rocket Boys, a memoir by Homer Hickman. There are many copies available through CWMARS, and if you want to read the book right away, there is a copy in the Buckland Library, where you could just pick it up. Here is a summary from amazon.com.
“Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my home town 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 extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia-a hard-scrabble little company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football. But in 1957, after the Soviet satellite Sputnik shot across the Appalachian sky, Sonny and his teenaged friends decided to do their bit for the U.S. space race by building their own rocket. A powerful story of growing up and of getting out, of a mother’s love and a father’s fears, Rocket Boys proves, like Angela’s Ashes and Russell Baker’s Growing Up before it, that the right storyteller and the right story can touch readers’ hearts and enchant their souls. (Hickman went on to have a distinguished career with NASA.)