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October Sky, originally published as Rocket Boys, is the story of NASA engineer
Homer H. Hickam Jr's teen years in Coalwood, W. Virginia. In 1957, Coalwood was
on the verge of financial disaster and America's imagination was captivated by
the flight of the Russian-launched Sputnik. The Rocket Boys, as the town
eventually came to call them, began their bid to join the space race by emptying
the powder from 12 cherry bombs into an empty flashlight casing. Several
iterations later, they were calculating sophisticated flight arcs and drawing
crowds at their rocket launches. Between launches, Hickam depicts Coalwood life:
the sadness when his science teacher and mentor falls ill, the brutal poverty
and danger of coal mining, the tension caused by the coal mine labor union
disputes, and the classic father-son clash in his own family.