Satire of Boy Scouts to Be Released in May by Koehler Books

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Rocket Man revolves around a Scouting "Rocket Day" and the "paramilitary types" encounted while trying to pull off a launch of rockets by a nerdowell father. Funny is an understatement for this satire of the BSA.

Chicago, IL, February 08, 2013 -(PressReleasePoint)- The novel Rocket Man http://www.koehlerbooks.com/books/rocket-man/ is a scouting story. Dale Hammer has been appointed "The Rocket Man" by his sons scout troop and so begins a one week journey down into scouting "hell." The book is undeniably funny and gives insight to an organizaton stuck in the past or as Dale puts it "only in the Scouts can men dress up in shorts and tasselled socks and not be arrested as child molestors."

Rocket Man has already garnered strong reviews as a satire on the American Dream. The Chicago Sun Times calls it "the funniest serious novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." From the first scene where Dale crosses a field with group of Cub Scouts and is written up by the Scout Master for "drinking" the novel is a journey into the strange rarified world where "adults get to play Army". The echoes of the current controversy involving the Boy Scouts certainly has seeds in the absurd customs and sometime weirdness found in Rocket Man.

Publishers Weekly cites one Scouting ritual in the novel as particularly funny when "Dale has a vividly mortifying turn as the Great Pumpkin, hunted by Scouts with marshmallow blow guns: 'The air is fouled by breath pumped in from a hundred PVC tubes.' The final "Rocket Day" is a moment when Dale must confront his nemeis the Scout Leader and do what he considers right.

Published in May by Koehler Books, Rocket Man is another take on an institutions that is going through the pain of change in the twenty first century.

The BSA will never be the same.

William Hazelgrove http://www.billhazelgrove.com is the Bestselling author of three previous novels, Ripples, Mica Highways, Tobacco Sticks. He has received awards and written in the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. The Pitcher will be out next fall with Koehler Books.

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