This is Homer "Sonny" Hickam, Jr.'s marvelously entertaining, extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia--a hardscrabble little company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football. The introspective second son of the mine's superintendent and a mother determined to push her son to a better life, Sonny fell in with a group of misfits for whom the future looked uncertain. But in 1957, after watching...

An uplifting portrait of a leading NASA engineer describes her childhood ambition to pursue a life in science, her achievement as her university's first woman to receive a Ph. D. in her field and her pivotal role in building history-making spacecraft. --Publsiher's description.