From a New York Times book review of Rocket Boys:
In the fall of 1957, when the Soviet space satellite Sputnik passed over southern West Virginia one evening, it caught the dazzled eye of a 14-year-old resident of the tiny coal-mining town of Coalwood, one Homer H. Hickam Jr.
As Hickam, now a retired NASA engineer, recalls in his thoroughly charming memoir, the experience changed him forever. A small, nearsighted, bright, and imaginative boy whose chief activities until that point had been reading science fiction and playing games with his pals, he at once knew that Coalwood would be too small for his future.
His hero now became Dr. Wernher von Braun, whom he could imagine "high on a gantry, lying on his back like Michelangelo, working with a wrench on the fuel lines of one of his rockets." Here was his ticket out of the hills of West Virginia. Like von Braun, he would build himself a rocket.
