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Hidden figures book reviews12/29/2023 ![]() ![]() In 2015, physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson who calculated the trajectories for many NASA missions received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from former US President Barack Obama. The book chronicles their brilliant work over three decades which eventually earned them slow advancement. While these women did the same work as their white counterparts, they were paid far less and started their careers by being relegated to the segregated west section of the Langley campus, where they had to use separate dining and bathroom facilities. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interlaced accounts of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. ![]() Johnson was one of four female African-American mathematicians known as the “computers in skirts” who worked on the Redstone, Mercury and Apollo space programmes for NASA. “If she says they’re good, I’m good to go.” “Get the girl, check the numbers,” Glenn said before boarding the rocket writes Shetterly in the book. We learn that when American astronaut John Glenn was minutes from being blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, there was just one person he trusted with the complex trajectory calculations required to bring him down safely from his orbital spaceflight: Katherine Johnson, who was something of a child prodigy in mathematics and worked in NASA’s segregated West area computers division. Shetterly doesn't play the austere historian in “Hidden Figures” so the book brims with anecdotes which serves the movie adaption well. The audience pleaser about the 1960s Space Race is competing for best picture this year at the Academy Awards. ![]() Shetterly's book which shot to No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list is now a blockbuster Hollywood movie. But they loved their work. They defied low expectations based on gender and race with composure to scale great heights. These underpaid African American women employees were blatantly overworked. There are interesting accounts of a heavily reinforced glass ceiling at NASA and its occasional, wafer-thin cracks in "Hidden Figures." Shetterly writes, “Women.had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.” They crunched numbers and were called human “computers.” They calculated the complex trajectories, launch windows and back-up return paths for flights that allowed astronauts like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shephard and John Glenn to travel to space safely. They defied gender and race barriers in the early years of the US space program to problem-solve for NASA. Shetterly's book is about a team of African-American women with a knack for numbers. We'd do well to put Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures into the hands of young men and women who love science. With a major movie due out in January, this book-club natural will be in demand.Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly, published by Harper Collins. The breadth of her well-documented research is immense, and her narrative compels on every level. This is an incredibly powerful and complex story, and Shetterly has it down cold. Shetterly does an outstanding job of weaving the nearly unbelievable stories of these women into the saga of NASA’s history (as well as its WWII-era precursor) while simultaneously keeping an eye on the battle for civil rights that swirled around them. What she did not know was that many of the women, particularly African American women, were employed not as secretaries but as “computers”: individuals capable of making accurate mathematical calculations at staggering speed who ultimately contributed to the agency’s aerodynamic and space projects on an impressive scale. As the daughter of an engineer who became a highly respected scientist, she was aware of the town’s close ties to NASA’s nearby Langley Research Center and also of the high number of African Americans, like him, who worked there. On a trip home to Hampton, Virginia, Shetterly stumbled upon an overlooked aspect of American history that is almost mythic in scope. ![]()
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