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Title details for Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly - Available

Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly
Bahni Turpin
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

The uplifting, amazing true story—a New York Times bestseller!

This edition of Margot Lee Shetterly's acclaimed book is perfect for young readers. It's the powerful story of four African-American female mathematicians at NASA who helped achieve some of the greatest moments in our space program.

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.

This book brings to life the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who lived through the Civil Rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the movement for gender equality, and whose work forever changed the face of NASA and the country.


  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    November 29, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780062668585
      • File size: 120515 KB
      • Duration: 04:11:04

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • ATOS Level: 8.2
    • Lexile® Measure: 1120
    • Interest Level: 4-8(MG)
    • Text Difficulty: 7-9

  • Reviews

    • The Horn Book

      July 1, 2017
      The talented black women working at NASA's Langley facility in the mid-twentieth century started as mathematics "human computers," but persisted through racism and sexism to make significant contributions as engineers, analysts, and programmers. Shetterly's outstanding young readers' edition of her similarly titled adult book highlights the intersecting worlds of educated, middle-class southern African Americans and Cold War space program scientists. Reading list, timeline. Glos., ind.

      (Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 29, 2016
      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.

    • Good Reading Magazine
      For six years, African American author Margot Lee Shetterly laboured over a project to bring recognition for the many black women mathematicians who worked mostly behind the scenes to advance American space exploration. The book has become a bestseller in the US and the film adaptation of the book was released in Australia last month. When she was growing up in Hampton,Virginia – home to the NASA Langley Research Center – so many of the family’s friends, colleagues and community leaders worked in science, maths and engineering that she thought that that was what black folks did. A comment by her father in 2010 that many of the women in that community had been ‘computers’ in the space race sparked a curiosity that led to years of research, interviews with many of the women and revelations about their lives in the segregated south of the USA. While the black women were the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked first at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) – which evolved into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – they were not alone in the shadows. Even the white women who made up most of Langley’s computing workforce over the years have been scarcely recognised for their contributions to the agency’s long-term success. Shetterly interviewed many women – she can name at least 50 black women who were computers, mathematicians, engineers or scientists – but she has focused on the life stories of three: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. Johnson, who was 93 when interviewed, recalled segregated buses to work, years of teaching and raising a family as well as her vital work in the space race, including working out the trajectory for John Glenn’s spaceflight. She has received NASA and national recognition. These women were known as ‘coloured computers’ and had segregated workspaces, canteen tables and bathrooms, but Shetterly has now brought them out into the light. Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • ATOS Level:8.2
  • Lexile® Measure:1120
  • Interest Level:4-8(MG)
  • Text Difficulty:7-9

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