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Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
Escrito por Margot Lee Shetterly
Narrado por Robin Miles
Ações de livro
Comece a ouvir- Editora:
- HarperAudio
- Lançado em:
- Sep 6, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780062472076
- Formato:
- Audiolivro
Nota do Editor
Descrição
The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.
Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.
Ações de livro
Comece a ouvirDados do livro
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
Escrito por Margot Lee Shetterly
Narrado por Robin Miles
Nota do Editor
Descrição
The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.
Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.
- Editora:
- HarperAudio
- Lançado em:
- Sep 6, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780062472076
- Formato:
- Audiolivro
Sobre o autor
Relacionado a Hidden Figures
Avaliações
Not only does this book focus on the role of the women, but it deals with the Civil Rights Movement. One of the biggest issues was integration of schools and universities and colleges. I had no idea that there was a five year period where there was no public education in Prince Edward County Virginia. At the beginning of their careers, the black mathematicians are forced to work on the west side of the Langley campus. They were referred to as "The West Computers" and many people did not even know that this unit existed. They had to use "coloured only" washrooms and sit at a segregated table in the cafeteria, until the 60s when integration finally happened. The only thing I disliked about this book, but others loved, was the amount of scientific details and facts. I enjoyed some of it, and much of it was necessary to the story, but I would have liked just a bit less. I am going to have to watch the movie.
The women, both black and white, started out when the word "computer" meant a person doing the calculations by hand that were needed for astronomy, engineering, and other areas that needed high-level math in quantity and at speed. As it became one of the few jobs other than nursing or teaching that a woman of education could pursue, it attracted women of the same education and ability as many of the men who were being hired as engineers. That set up a dynamic that would play out over the years, as blacks both male and female, and women both black and white, began insisting on being recognized for their real contributions, and a percentage of it.
Virginia law required that workplaces be segregated, so the black women hired as computers worked in a separate building that came to be known as West Computing. The white women were in East Computing.
This book follows the stories of the women of West Computing, including Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, and West Computing itself from its earliest days with just twenty women, through the expansion during the war years and the space program. the women worked initially isolated at West Computing, but gradually began to work closely with various engineering groups, on airplane design, missiles, and eventually spacecraft and their guidance systems. Though it's now said they were known as "human computers," that's not quite right. The machines we now call early computers were late arrivals, here and everywhere else that the women known as computers worked. These women became the programmers of those machine computers, as the machines became reliable enough and powerful enough, and the engineers considered it beneath them.
The women of West Computing struggled with both racism and sexism, but they were tough, smart, and persistent. As they more and more proved their value, increasing numbers of them became recognized as--and accorded the employment status of--mathematicians and engineers. In the 1950s and 1960s, Virginia resisted integration more than some other states, and even this federal facility had to work around that, but as time passed, individual computers and mathematicians became assigned permanently to the engineering groups they were working with most closely. When these women were from West Computing, that created a de facto integrated work group. It was a slow eating away at segregation, but it happened, whittling down the separate and segregated West Computing over years. Finally, when the Langley facility became part of NASA, segregation at all NASA facilities, and therefore West Computing, was abolished.
We follow the personal lives of these women as well as their professional lives. The two interacted, as each was affected by World War II, the post-war years and the rising tension with the Soviet Union, and the growth of the space program and the space race. These women, along with their white counterparts at East Computing, and at JPL and elsewhere, were crucial to the success of the space program. It's a fascinating look at a corner of history that's generally overlooked, and it held my interest all the way through.
Highly recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
I researched the author around halfway through the book and found that Shetterly said growing up in Langley she thought that being an engineer or human computer was just what black people did. I think this speaks to why the account did not highlight the right information. The author is jaded by seeing black people do amazing things every day.
I also had an issue with how the civil rights movement was brought into the book. I felt that in the capacity it was presented, it could have just as easily have been left out. Everybody knows (I hope) that segregation went beyond the schools. Segregation in the school was an important element in understanding the story. However, the bathrooms and water fountains did nothing to add to the story. I did not feel like they helped paint a picture of being outcast and lessened as they were likely meant to.
Finally, there is this issue of being a "double minority"- a woman in STEM and a black woman at that. There are challenges that come with each of those identities, and those challenges are multiplicative when you put them together. However, I felt like the book just highlighted everything these women did well with very little regard for how hard they had to fight at work for the recognition. I am not saying it was absent, because it definitely was not. I am saying that the conviction with which it was described was lacking.
I would still love to see the movie and I would love to feel confident enough giving this book more than two stars. I just don't feel that I am honestly describing what I felt while I was reading and how I feel looking back on the information in the book if I use any other rating.
I loved every minute of reading this book and it needs to be in all school libraries. I get that schools don't have the time to devote to each historical topic, but having something like this (there is a Young Readers version available here) for them to read would be great. I wish I had spent more time in the non-fiction section back when I was in school but I'm trying to make up for it now. I love the stories of women throughout history, seeing that we've been contributing to the world in more than 2 ways, and promoting those stories when I see them. Fortunately, this one doesn't exactly need my help. It's been great to see all the notoriety this story has gotten, it's well deserved.
Shetterly goes a long way to giving the reader an understanding of not only the important nature of these women's work, but the sacrifices they made to do the work and the pressures they were under from several sources. The difference in the way they were treated at work and at home, by coworkers and by passersby on the sidewalk, is well delineated and it paints a good picture of what it must have meant to be there, to be breaking down barriers and to be given credit for their incredible intelligence. I appreciate that they all say they were just doing their jobs, which I'm sure is true, but there's always more to it than that. I've known people who "just" do their jobs and there's a difference between them and people who love the work. It's this difference that breaks down the barriers that these women took on, purposefully or not.
I appreciated Shetterly's inclusion of the timeline with the Civil Rights movement. I am familiar with the events from school and other reading, but it helped me out to have it overlaid on the timeline of the events at NACA and NASA, to understand the shifting sands the women found themselves on. She did a great job too of delineating the cultural and workplaces differences with being African American, a woman, or an African American and a woman. The African American men got to come in as engineers and the women had to fight for that too. White women were also given advantages over African American women, which caused the women featured here to deal with twice the problems the others had.
This is a book that everyone should read, but especially if you watched the movie, which really only covers half. The book carries the story of the three central women all the way to the moon landing, while the movie stops at John Glenn's orbit. Shetterly's writing style is impeccable and the story itself is astounding.
Indeed, in the epilogue Shetterly mourns and outlines some of the material she had to cut in order to make this book work. And it makes me wish that she will write more books. More about the later years of these three ladies -- fighting against sexism in engineering. More about the other women who barely appeared. Heck, maybe just straight biographies of each of these women, now that the context is established. I would sign up to read all of those books.