I will be honest and say I saw the movie before reading the book and loved it. So when my family went to NASA in Florida and the book was for sale I grabbed it. And I can not begin to tell you how much more information and how much better the book was than the movie (isn’t that usually the case?).
I had not heard of the history of the these incredible women until one day on a tv show called “Timeless” (episode Space Race which aired Nov 28, 2016). I actually went and Googled it after the episode and I think maybe a lot of people did because only a short time later the movie Hidden Figures came out. I ran to the theater to see it and was not disappointed.
But back to the book. Not only are these women but they are African-American women who during the fight for equality proved any woman can be smarter than any man. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden are the women who got our astronauts into space and home at a time when they couldn’t even use the same bathroom as white women could.
This book is worth the read and the reader will not be disappointed that they incredible women made history and they are celebrated for it. ~ Kimberly
The #1 New York 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 ‘coloured 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.
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