Hidden Figures

Title: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

Genre: Nonfiction, American History and Civil Rights

Pages: 368 Length: 10.75 Hours

Listened to Audiobook

Recommended: If you like American history, or civil rights or women's rights

Song: "Independent Women Pt. I" by Destiny's Child

In 1950s Virginia, some people at NASA chose to see beyond color and hire black women for their sheer ability to do math. Shetterly thoroughly uncovers the stories of three black women whose calculations were key to American success.

The Upside

"Hidden Figures" is now a major motion picture, and I can't wait to see it! In a time when calculators were people (really: it was a job title), and civil rights was a new word in the American vocabulary, the world had its eyes to the skies and wondered how to get there. NASA (formerly known as NACA) had a lot of work to do. They hired women, a lot of women to do all the math necessary to break the sound barrier, and eventually achieve the first moon landing.

Thank goodness NASA is a meritocracy. Some of the best calculators they had were the super oppressed black women. Had they only seen the skin color, so many more things cold have gone wrong, and they didn't because a few black women knew their stuff.

In addition to covering their careers, Shetterly tells about the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who each played a significant part in winning the space race.

The Downside

I was incredibly bored listening to this book. I lost track of the story a lot because it took a lot of tangents. The book might have moved faster with more personal accounts and quotes, and more color added to the scenes. The book gets lost in the math. Were I more analytically minded, I might have followed it better.

Audiobook

The narrator does a good job. This is the longest book I've listened to on Playster, and I wish it would play books at faster speeds like Audible, Overdrive and Hoopla. Perhaps that would have made the book better.

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