About
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.
It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.
Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.
When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.
A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see.
Description
<p>What if you treated others the way you'd like to be treated? What if everyone did that? What kind of world could there be? Robert and Kait decide to look for the golden ruler that their Mom has told them about, only to find out that she meant RULE instead of ruler. What is this "Golden Rule" and what does it mean? Join in the children's quest to discover how to follow the Golden Rule and share it with others, as you meet many classroom friends from the author's previous books. This is the eighth rhyming children's book by award-winning author Sherrill S. Cannon, whose other bestselling books include Mice & Spiders & Webs...Oh My!, My Fingerpaint Masterpiece, Manner-Man, Gimme-Jimmy, The Magic Word, Peter and the Whimper-Whineys and Santa's Birthday Gift. Former teacher Sherrill S. Cannon has won thirty-six awards for her previous rhyming books and is also the author of seven published and internationally performed plays for elementary school children. She has been called "an absolute master of rhyming" by Mother Daughter Book Reviews and "a modern day Dr. Seuss" by GMTA Review. She lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Now retired, she travels the country with her husband in an RV, going from coast to coast to visit their children and grandchildren, and sharing her books along the way. Publisher's website: http://sbpra.com/sherrillscannon</p>
Story Behind The Book
Rocket Man was written after I moved to the suburbs from the city. I looked around and found myself and others unable to keep up with what had become the American Dream...the big car, house, bascially the overheated middle class life that had become the American nightmare. When I became the Rocket Man for my son's Scout Troop I knew I had a motif to write this novel of a man isolated in a world rapidly spinning out of control. Rocket Man is a story of our time. A man about to lose his home, trying desperately to hang to what really matters in life. In this way, Rocket Man, is really about us.
Reviews
Best Books of the Year...San Antonoio Express<br />Funniest Novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man...Chicago Sun Times<br />THE FUNNIEST NOVEL OF THE ELECTION YEAR. William Elliott Hazelgrove’s Rocket Man is in the tradition of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Richard Ford’s Independence Day and Tom Poratta‘s Election; all three writers coming to grips with contemporary life in the suburbs. Rocket Man is a satire of life today...Chicago Tribune
