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The Coalwood Way: A Memoir, by Homer Hickam
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From the #1 bestselling author of October Sky comes this rich, unforgettable tale. With the same dazzling storytelling that distinguished his first memoir, Homer Hickam takes us deeper into the soul of his West Virginia hometown at a moment when its unique way of life is buffeted by forces of time and change.
It is fall 1959. Homer “Sonny” Hickam and his fellow Rocket Boys are in their senior year at Big Creek High, and the town of Coalwood finds itself at a painful crossroads.
The strains can be felt within the Hickam home, where Homer Sr. struggles to save the mine, and his wife, Elsie, is feeling increasingly isolated from both her family and the townspeople. Sonny, despite a blossoming relationship with a local girl, finds his own mood darkened by an unexplainable sadness.
Then, with the holidays approaching, trouble at the mine and the arrival of a beautiful young outsider bring unexpected changes in both the Hickam family and the town of Coalwood ... as this luminous memoir moves toward its poignant conclusion.
- Sales Rank: #348794 in Books
- Color: Silver
- Published on: 2001-09-04
- Released on: 2001-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.00" h x .90" w x 4.30" l, .43 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 400 pages
- Homer Hickman
- Memoir
- West Virginia
Amazon.com Review
In this follow-up to his bestselling autobiography Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam chronicles the eventful autumn of 1959 in his hometown, the West Virginia mining town of Coalwood. Sixteen-year-old Homer and his pals in the Big Creek Missile Agency are high school seniors, still building homemade rockets and hoping that science will provide them with a ticket into the wider world of college and white-collar jobs. Such dreams make them suspect in a conservative small town where "getting above yourself" is the ultimate sin and where Homer's father, superintendent of the Coalwood mines, is stingy with praise and dubious about his son's ambitions. Homer's mother remains supportive, but bluntly reminds him, "You can't expect everything to go your way. Sometimes life just has another plan." Indeed, Hickam's unvarnished portrait of Coalwood covers class warfare (union miners battling with his authoritarian father), provincial narrow-mindedness (the local ladies scorn a young woman living outside wedlock with a man who abuses her), and endless gossiping along the picket "fence line." These sharp details make the unabashed sentiment of the book's closing chapters feel earned rather than easy. Hickam can spin a gripping yarn and keep multiple underlying themes and metaphors going at the same time. His tender but gritty memoir will touch readers' hearts and minds. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Not really a sequel to Hickam's first memoir, Rocket Boys (which was made into the successful movie, October Sky, and dealt primarily with his gang of misfit friends and their inventive, adventurous exploits) this book, set around Christmas 1959, is a study of the town of Coalwood and how a fast-moving world affects a small community resistant to change and the introspective teenage boy in its midst. Hickman's reading is flawless. His voice and perspectiveAas a man looking back on his childhoodAconvincingly conveys experience and a reminiscent tone, while at the same time sounding so full of youthful exuberance that listeners will be certain they hear the voice of teenage Homer himself. Coalwood, W.Va., is a coal-mining town. Homer Hickam Sr., the author's father, is the superintendent of the mine and resented by the workers. To his children, he is a formidable man, and his imaginative second son, Homer Jr., aka "Sonny," obsessed with the 1950s space race, does not want to follow in his father's black, dusty footprints. With Christmas fast approaching, the tension in the town grows as layoffs threaten miners' jobs, until Sonny's father takes a huge risk to save them and the town's livelihood. Simultaneous release with the Dell hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 18). (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this follow-up to his acclaimed Rocket Boys, retired NASA engineer Hickam recounts tensions in his household during his last Christmas before college, even as the Rocket Boys are drafted to help celebrate the holidays with a really big bang.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
I recommend these books to all
By Vi G
Again "Sonny" Hickam's story telling talents completely pull you in until you "swan" you are a native born member of Coalwood society. Somewhere in his stories are a potion of truth mixed with an over-active imagination & you never know which is which in the story line.
My roots do intertwined with Coalwood & West Virginia and it is a pleasant homecoming experience for me.
I recommend these books to all .
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Drill Farther into Hickam's Coalwood Roots
By thomasbc
Aimlessly wandering the fiction aisles of the library, glumly looking over the "been-there-done-that" Grisham novels, wishfully scanning the Hiaasen section in slim hopes of finding something new, when out of the corner of my eye, I caught a name on a book spine: Homer H. Hickam Jr. I instantly recognized the name as a character from one of my all-time favorite movies, "October Sky". I pulled the book, expecting it to be "Rocket Boys", the memoir on which the movie was based. I had always meant to pick up that book and get more familiar with the story that so captivated me in the movie. Only, the title of this book was "The Coalwood Way". Instantly, I knew that my browsing malaise was cured (funny how that often works)!
Not only did I now have a chance to get more familiar with the "Rocket Boys" story and characters, but I also had a whole other novel with which to do it. For, you see, this memoir isn't really a sequel to the aforementioned book, but actually an expansion of a section of the original story; a kind of story within a story. Think of it as zooming in on just one section of a fractal image to see all of the intricate details within the new image.
The scope of the first memoir was pretty much the entire high school career of Homer (Sonny) and the Rocket Boys and focused predominantly on their exploits with amateur rocketry. But, the real charm of the original story came from the background setting and people of Coalwood, West (by God) Virginia. The boys of the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA) still play a big part in this story that spans basically only one year of high school from roughly Christmas of their junior year through Christmas of their senior year. However, this time around, rocketry plays second fiddle as we delve much deeper into the lush background and learn more about Sonny's deep roots in Coalwood and how really fortunate (and bittersweet) it was that he and the rest of the boys of the BCMA could escape that life.
Having seen the movie first, I found myself constantly imposing the images of the actors onto the characters in the book, which wasn't always such a bad thing since all of the characters in the movie were wonderfully cast. The only time this was a problem was with the group of boys, which in the movie numbered four, but in the book numbered six! It seems that possibly as many as three characters in the books, Sherman, O'Dell and Billy, were all "merged" into one character, Sherman O'Dell, in the movie. Not much of a problem, though, as Hickam's eloquent prose quickly conjured up images for all six young men.
In this story, the town of Coalwood really comes alive. I instantly felt like I could have grown up there myself and maybe, in a way, I did. Hickam has an uncanny ability to touch the heartstrings of just about any American man (and possibly woman as well) who grew up in and around that time period, regardless of geographic location. We all have either shared a common anecdote or experienced an unrequited, adolescent love like he describes in his books (I was just crushed when Ginger told him that they would just be great friends). The ending of this book did seem a bit sappy and contrived but, darn it, I felt like it really needed to have a storybook ending. The beleaguered folks of Coalwood deserved one, even if it probably didn't actually happen exactly like that (i.e. historical fiction).
I immensely enjoyed this book. So much so, that I have since gone back and read the original "Rocket Boys" and then skipped forward to read the third book in the series "Sky of Stone". I'll probably also buy his non-fiction book "Torpedo Junction" and his true fiction novel "Back to the Moon". But, this is the one that started it for me. I think I have found another favorite author!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Down home again in Appalachia with Homer
By Mr. Joe
Several years ago, ex-NASA engineer Homer Hickam published the first volume of his memoirs, ROCKET BOYS, which was subsequently made into the hit film OCTOBER SKY. In these, the author remembers growing up in the West Virginia coal town of Coalwood in the late 1950s. From the moment he saw the first Soviet Sputnik traverse the night sky in 1957, Homer became obsessed with space, rockets and his hero, Werner von Braun. Along with several high school chums, Hickam built and, after some initial failures, launched several dozen rockets. As high school seniors, the group won a national science fair for their achievements in rocketry.
In THE COALWOOD WAY, Homer expands on that period during his final high school year when he was steadily improving the design and performance of his missiles, but before he won the national competition that was the culminating triumph of his first book. This second volume of memoirs focuses less on rocketry than the other challenges Hickam faced in his hometown and personal life. His father, the mine superintendent, is a stern workaholic who demonstrates little overt love for his second son (while being more lavish with his firstborn, Jim). His mother, Elsie, is increasingly disenchanted with her marriage and life in Coalwood, and wants to move to Florida to sell real estate. Miners are being laid off by the parent company, an Ohio steel manufacturer. Families are going hungry. There's talk of a strike. Homer is driven to get all A's in school to be able to escape his environment, go to college, and ultimately work at Cape Canaveral. And, of course, there's the distraction of girls, and deciding whom to take to the Christmas Formal. After all, Melba June did sidle up close and say in a throaty voice, "I just love your rockets."
That THE COALWOOD WAY is less inspiring then its predecessor, and that Hollywood is unlikely to consider it material for the silver screen, shouldn't detract from the fact that it's a poignant coming-of-age story with an attractive hero. Delightfully, the author can be occasionally humorous in a homespun sort of way, as when he observes of preachers:
"Did failure to volunteer information count as a lie? I didn't think it did though I wouldn't have wanted to put that question to a preacher. It was my experience that preachers could get snagged on the details and miss the big picture entirely."
Perhaps my favorite character in the whole book is Elsie. As Moms should be, she seems eternally wise. She doesn't hesitate to occasionally tweak her husband's stiff-necked obstinacy, and there are no shenanigans that Homer is getting into, or considering, that she doesn't know of. It is she I most look forward to reading about in Homer's next volume of memories, SKY OF STONE.
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