Hidden Figures
The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
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4.0 • 354 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, Hidden Figures is the never-before-told story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in 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 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.
Freshman Common Read: University of Mary Washington, MIT, Cedar Crest College, University of Houston, SUNY Oneonta, University of West Virginia, College of William and Mary, Lafayette College, Palm Beach State College, Lone Star College--among others
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 a group of 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 quartet of women at the heart of the story. The movie adaptation of this rousing book has become a smash hit.
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
This is the book not the movie!
Unless you read at a higher level then this book might be a hard read for you. It is written by a very intelligent woman. For an intelligent audience. I genuinely enjoyed this book. But I hope people that get it don't think they are buying a novel about these women's lives. It is about their world. Really. The entire world that touches, talks to, brushes by or simply happens near them. I liken it to the many Alan Turing books I've read. It's a ton of info and if your not paying attention you won't realize you read something about the people themselves. Again. I loved the book. I love these complicated books. Everyone else that tells me they read it because they saw me reading it though, also have told me they couldn't finish it because it just wasn't what they were expecting.
A very difficult read
I have a very high reading level and I struggled with the book. The essence of the story is wonderful once you get past the labyrinth of people never heard of again. The women in this book are incredible inspirations. What they accomplished in the face of so much adversity is inspiring. Very glad that I stuck with the book even if this was the longest it has ever taken me to read a book (vertigo didn't help).
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
Amazing book about the untold stories of these wonderful and smart women.