Hidden Figures
The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
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4.1 • 17 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller
Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program.
Before 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 coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘colored computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
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 mankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For all its innovation, NASA in the 1940s wasn’t an especially progressive place. Female mathematicians in general, and black women in particular, were segregated from their male colleagues—but that isolation didn’t limit their contributions. In Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly gives four remarkable African-American women their due. Her biography moves like a thriller, sweeping from World War II and the Civil Rights movement to the Apollo moon missions. Along the way, Shetterly never loses sight of the brilliant, confident trio of women at the heart of the story. This rousing book has already been adapted into a film.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shetterly, founder of the Human Computer Project, passionately brings to light the important and little-known story of the black women mathematicians hired to work as computers at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va., part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA's precursor). The first women NACA brought on took advantage of a WWII opportunity to work in a segregated section of Langley, doing the calculations necessary to support the projects of white male engineers. Shetterly writes of these women as core contributors to American success in the midst of a cultural "collision between race, gender, science, and war," teasing out how the personal and professional are intimately related. She celebrates the skills of mathematicians such as Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Hoover, whose brilliant work eventually earned them slow advancement but never equal footing. Shetterly collects much of her material directly from those who were there, using personal anecdotes to illuminate the larger forces at play. Exploring the intimate relationships among blackness, womanhood, and 20th-century American technological development, Shetterly crafts a narrative that is crucial to understanding subsequent movements for civil rights. A star-studded feature film based on Shetterly's book is due out in late 2016.
Customer Reviews
A Contemporary Historical Journey
This covers social injustice at multiple levels and through multiple prisms. Giving light to many who where directly and indirectly obscured from the great swathes of social mobility and technological advancement. Importantly this book manages to narrate the stories both technically and emotionally with grace and insight.