A friend recommended this to me years back and although I was interested enough to chuck it in my shopping basket at Amazon a couple of years back it’s taken me until now to get around to picking it up to read. This is the story (true) of Sonny Hickam and his friends known as the ‘Rocket Boys’ who, in the late 1950s, were inspired by the Sputnik satellites to build and launch their own rockets in a small coal mining town in West Virginia.

The moral that’s often repeated throughout the book is that you can learn anything if you want it hard enough. This is the journey from ramming tubes with explosive and doing nothing more than setting the garden fence on fire to well designed rockets that eventually fly six miles into the sky and take Sonny out of the coal mining valleys and to the national science fair (and after the book closes give the author a career at NASA). I’m amazed at the organisation of the boys in the book as my childhood science experimentation was always lacking in refinement and progress.

I enjoyed the story because I enjoyed watching the ‘Big Creek Missile Agency’ team develop and learn. The family and cultural background of the book is interesting but sometimes gets a bit sickly sweet with nostalgia for a way of life and an era that’s now gone. And as always with true life stories there are things that would seem too pat if they were featured in fiction but I expect that those incidents are the truest of the lot.