Genre: Non-fiction / Biography
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, 2016
Pages: 368
Rating: Highly Recommend
Synopsis: Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of the NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in the America's space program - and whose contributions have been unheralded until now.
Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these "colored computers," as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America's fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Drawing on the oral histories of scores of these "computers," personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America's greatest adventure and NASA's groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine.
Moving from World War II through NASA's golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women's rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world - and whose lives show how out of one of America's most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.
Review: On my list for quite some time, I saw it on my library's shelf of audio books and snagged it.
I suspect I would have found the print version rather dry, but as an audio book it was good. Math and space are subjects that typically wouldn't interest me, but history, the civil rights movement, and gender equality are themes that speak to me.
I liked this book a whole lot more than I had ever expected I would, and I'm so glad I gave it a chance. I hope to watch the movie this weekend. I think it will transition well to the big screen, or my little screen, so to speak.
In some ways it reminded me of another book I liked, The Warmth of Other Suns.
No comments:
Post a Comment