Book #217: October Sky

Book #217: October Sky by Homer Hickam

April 12, 2016

I started this book way back at the beginning of the school year. That's how little reading time I've been able to fit in the classroom, though it is a fairly long memoir. I saw the movie when I was in high school, and I remember liking it. Hickam's mother stood out to me most in the film, and she's the dominant force in her family in the book as well. I would consider this text yet another example of an autobiographical work worth reading.

I was impressed with how dedicated teenage Hickam and his friends were to figuring out how to make their rockets fly. They took fucking calculus in order to get down their calculations; Hickam wasn't even allowed to be in the course, and he studied it independently! When I first got to that part of the book, I started thinking about how much I used to slack off in math. When I was in the fifth grade, I was picked out amongst my peers to take pre-algebra the following year...which was a pretty big deal for me at the time. But I couldn't quite get my head around it from the get-go, and I lagged behind my peers, the dumbest kid in the smart class, I guess.

So while I had an aptitude for math, I grew to hate it pretty early on. I even flunked trigonometry in high school; I never really learned much after geometry, cheating and faking my way through the previous year before it finally caught up to me as a sophomore. I retook the year, got a decent grade, and said adios to math before my senior year. Looking back on it, I have a lot of regrets about that. I'm still more of a literary person than a mathematical one, but I could have been both, maybe. Oh, well.

Anyway, Hickam and his friends start to dream big when they see how high they can make their rockets fly. And that's not a normal thing where they're from. They grew up in a mining town in West Virginia. Hickam's father was a dedicated manager at the mine, so he had some advantages over his poorer peers, but nobody ever expected much from him, least of all his old man.

The most compelling thing about this story is the setting. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of great change in the U.S., and this was even true in little tucked away towns like the aptly-named Coalwood. Young Hickam learns that the town is bound for ruin; before too long, the coal's either gonna run out, or the demand for it will, and the coal mine is the only point of their town. So during a time when everyone there had a lot to be fearful about, Hickam and his friends brought them a glimmer of hope and excitement with their frequent rocket launches.

This particular book is part of the curriculum for the district I work for, and I'm glad. Unfortunately, I can't really use it in my own classroom, as it describes unhooking a girl's bra, and Hickam loses his virginity to a girl in the backseat of her boyfriend's car (naughty!). Obviously these are normal details of adolescent sexuality, nothing distasteful about it; it's not unusual for a teenage boy to ogle a girl's chest in the auditorium. But, as I've described in previous posts, I work in a rather delicate, sheltered environment. I'd recommend it to some of my students, when they're in a more normal environment. I think it'd be a great book for any American to read, to give them an interesting perspective on a turbulent time in our history.