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    Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Unavailable
    Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Unavailable
    Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Audiobook10 hours

    Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

    Written by Margot Lee Shetterly

    Narrated by Robin Miles

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller

    NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
    Oscar Nominated For Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay

    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 ‘colored 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9780008201319
    Unavailable
    Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Author

    Margot Lee Shetterly

    Margot Lee Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where she knew many of the women in her book Hidden Figures. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and the recipient of a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grant for her research on women in computing. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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    Reviews for Hidden Figures

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    • 4/5
      Beginning with WWII and the need for women to fill jobs during wartime, the government hired human "computers", black and white females, to calculate math equations to aid in the aeronautical and space industry. Langley Aeronautical Lab in Hampton, VA was the facility on the east coast. Most of the blacks hired went to segregated colleges, majored in math, anticipating a career in teaching which was a "typical" career for a black woman at that time. Another recent book, "Rocket Girls", explores a similar group of computers, though primarily white, on the west coast and is a fascinating read just for the perspective of the rise of women in the workplace and the injustices they faced. In "Hidden Figures" the road to equality is even more daunting, given that race was added to the equation. Margot Lee Shetterly, a black woman, grew up in (the "comapany" town) of Hampton, VA and her father worked at Langley. It was not til a visit home as an adult that she learned the story of these women. It's a fascinating book, well-researched and well-written. Though it focuses on four of the African-American women, the author adds historical perspective to the story that enhances the reading experience. Though I do plan to see the movie, I'm glad I read the book first and would recommend it.
    • 4/5
      During WWII, women performed the complex calculations required by the US military aeronautics program. Some of them were African American women. I wish that I had known about these women when I was growing up, when I had zero role models for a career in the sciences. While I found this book a little dry and dull at times, I am so glad that the story of the colored computers is being made known (and I'm sure the movie version will liven up the story).This book was inspirational, educational and infuriating. The female mathematicians and engineers "had to be twice as good to get half as far". It didn't help that their Langley work site was in Virginia, a state that was inordinately determined to defy every decision of the Federal government or Supreme Court to lessen segregation. Rather than integrate its grad schools, Virginia agreed to pay for their education so long as negro students got it some place other than Virginia. When buses crossed the border into Virginia, negro passengers had to move to the back or get off of the bus. Negro computers were in a separate office space and had a designated table in the cafeteria with a sign over it for the Colored Computers. The space for the white computers did not provide bathrooms for the colored computers or engineers, even though some were temporarily assigned to work there. The outrageous indignities just went on and on.Despite the racism and sexism, these women managed to make careers out of what started out to be temporary jobs. Their work extended into the sixties and the Mercury and Apollo space programs. I was much more interested in the struggles and achievements in the professional lives of the women as a whole than I was in their personal lives, and I found it difficult keeping their stories straight. I thought that the epilogue didn't really add anything useful to the book and it inexplicably added new characters. All in all however, I am very glad that this book was written.I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, however after reading a few chapters I switched over to the audiobook borrowed from the library.
    • 4/5
      I'm late to the party, but still enjoyed this book very much. The author really did her research and wrote the story about NACA/NASA's black female computers in a smooth and informative way. There was enough explanation without getting lost or over simplified to follow along what Katherine, Dorothy and Mary did at their jobs and the issues they faced living in the segregated south.
    • 2/5
      I had a very difficult time reading this book an the only reason I was able to get as into it as I did was because I had a lot of time on my hands one day and read about 80 pages of the book in that one day. The writing is fine, but it is very boring. The importance of the story is incredibly lost in the writing style and that really bothered me.

      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.
    • 5/5
      Inspirational from cover to cover. Thank you, ladies, for your dedicated service.
    • 5/5
      Astonishing history of black women who calculated aeronautical and astronautical analyses that took people to the moon! This all occurred in the background of evolving black rights in the United States of America. this was a gripping narrative from beginning to end and the narrator was absolutely perfect. I learnt and enjoyed so much about this part of history. Just loved it!
    • 5/5
      It always amazes me when I come upon stories such as these – women basically lost to history. I had no idea about this cadre of women who worked for the nascent NASA. They were actually called computers; but in essence they were early engineers. They did this vital, valuable work and yet the credit fell on the men. How about that? The book singles out four women to profile – this is not historical fiction by the way – but it is the story of so many more women.Even though this is non-fiction the book reads like a novel. Ms. Shatterly introduces her heroines and the reader learns about these amazing women in the context of their time. Despite living in horribly restrictive times – as women and as women of color they break so many barriers. They still deal with being all of the other issues women are still dealing with today – motherhood, discrimination, men claiming their work. But this all happened at a time when blacks were still being relegated to separate bathrooms, water fountains, etc. In fact one of the issues was finding a building for them to work in so they wouldn’t “mix” with the white workers. It does make for some uncomfortable reading at times. As it should.I was utterly fascinated by the stories of the times, of the women, of the work they did and of how Ms. Shetterly wove it all together. I didn’t know about the movie when I chose to review the book but now I admit I’m looking forward to seeing it. It will add fictional elements of course but I’m sure it will be fascination. These women deserve to be celebrated and it is long overdue.
    • 5/5
      The movie didn't do this magnificent story justice.
    • 4/5
      Non-fiction about a group of black American women working for the US government’s defense program, during 1943 to 1969, as human “computers.” Prior to this book, and the subsequent movie, this group was not well known. At the time, women rarely worked in mathematics, science, and technology. Black women faced additional obstacles that came with living in the American South (near Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia) during segregation and the beginning of the civil rights movement. They played key roles in “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

      The biographical information centers on Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden (who entered the scene later), though many other contributors are mentioned. I have seen the movie, and quite a bit of dramatic license is taken, but they do a nice job of translating non-fiction into a storyline. The book is more technical and not as tightly focused. It jumps around quite a bit, which proved more challenging to follow when listening to the audio book (which is beautifully read by Robin Miles). Margot Lee Shetterly does a nice job of shining a light on these brilliant and dedicated, but previously overlooked, women.
    • 3/5
      This book looks at several of the Black women computers/mathematicians/engineers that were so vital to NACA during and immediately following WWII, and then in NASA during the 1960s heyday of space travel.The author of this book grew up in Hampton, VA, and knew this story her entire life. She had access to people to interview, so she was the perfect person to write it. It is a fascinating story and important--I grew up being told that even in the 1960s the only options for any women were to be teachers or nurses. Yet these Black women--and many more like them, and white women on the opposite side of the NACA campus--had gotten degrees in the 1930s and had important technical careers.So this story is interesting and important, but I really did not find it particularly well-written. The organization is confusing. Is this a biography? A history of black women in NACA/NASA? A history of NACA/NASA? A history of flight development from WW2 through the moon landing? Then there is plenty of details about a Black women's sorority thrown in that just...didn't fit. It felt like Shetterly was not quite sure what book she wanted to write, so put them all in one.I appreciate the well-organized bibliography. I recently read a book with a poor bibliography, so this was wonderful. I have not seen this movie, but am curious. I think there is a very good chance that the movie cleans up the story as told in the book. Or maybe not.
    • 4/5
      Okay here goes. I expected more. It had the facts, and as important as they are to show the progress from such stupid ideas it really was kind of dull and longer than most of my 6th graders would last through. I will add it to my classroom digital library just because it will familiarize kids with the idea anyone can do anything even if things are stacked against you. But I don't foresee many reading it.
    • 3/5
      I think this book is definitely worth reading. It's important history. It's not what I was expecting though. It's a detailed non-fiction account. The movie previews made me feel excited so I was expecting that feeling from the book. This book doesn't have that personal connection feel that I think the movie probably does. (I haven't watched it yet, but I cannot wait.)
      This book tells about issues women and blacks and especially black women had trying to be engineers and work in higher mathematical and scientific positions. It also tells about certain women who broke through, their backgrounds and what jobs they did.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful book that looks at the impact, both in science and in society and within the culture of NASA, that Black women played through aircraft research during World War 2 and eventually the research for the space race. This is an amazing group of women who demonstrated not only highly developed skills in mathematics and engineering, but perseverance in an era when they faced sexism and racism. The story in Hidden Figures is inspirational for many reasons, and I highly recommend it, especially as motivation to those who have an interest in math, science, and engineering, but who may think they are not the right fit for those fields.
    • 5/5
      A compelling book that unmakes and remakes history, showing us the "hidden figures" who make up the great milestones of human existence.
    • 1/5
      This one almost ended up on the DNF list, but I slogged through it (it did make good "put me to sleep before bed" reading).
      As another reviewer noted, the story of the female computers, especially the Black women, and their role in NACA/NASA is a story that needs to be known, but that does not mean THIS book is any good.
      There are several problems with it.
      1) The author is tackling too many topics at once. Is this a book about the space race? Is it about racial injustice? Is it about gender equality? Is it about life in the 1950s? Is it about three or four women who are excellent with numbers? Unfortunately Shetterly tries to make it about all of these things and the individual topics get lost as they all shout for attention and you don't know where to direct your attention.
      2) Sentence structure. Excellent examples of over-writing. In an attempt to add visual and personal interest, too many dependent clauses find themselves embedded into compound-complex sentences containing flowery adjectives...(I tried to imitate her style writing that sentence, but I couldn't do it and didn't care to work harder) Once in a while such a sentence works. When most of the sentences are 3-4 lines long and the point gets lost in the details. It's hard to read that style of writing. Dickens can get away with it because of his wit and the time period in which he wrote. Few writers today can, and Shetterly definitely can't.
      3)There so much data and history -- it's as though all of her research had to go into the book and she couldn't bear to cut out a single researched fact.
      4) It's devoid of emotion. There are so many people mentioned in such an arm's length away style that there's no opportunity to connect with any of the characters. Bio facts are given, segregation facts are given, but no sense of how the people felt about their struggles. It's like watching story through binoculars, rather than a camera lens.
      5) Too many "name drops" about figures that might be known to those well-versed in the history, but not outsiders like me. It made the characters disappear into the sea of names because I lost the ability to know which names I'd need to learn and which were one-off mentions. Maybe she included the names so she'd have a bigger index or get more hits in a keyword search?

      I slogged through the book and picked up The Calculating Stars to read at the same time. WAY better and that sci-fi book helped me understand some of the key parts of Hidden Figures that got lost in the pile of information. Read The Calculating Stars instead. For this one, I hear the movie is actually pretty good.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this, and I wanted it to be longer. I wanted more details about what the women were working on day to day, and I loved the bit in the afterward/author's note part that acknowledged how many stories had more to them that just couldn't be crammed into this book. I want those parts toooooooo. Anyway, it was a fascinating read with lots of really cool details.
    • 4/5
      This is an important read that uncovers a whole major slice of history that was untold for far too long. It is not a novelisation of the movie (the movie is based on the book), it is a biographical narrative and history book combined. It isn't one I could read quickly. It's factually dense and doesn't have a 'plot' as such. But it was truly enlightening, and goes into far more than just the space race. And you certainly don't have to be American to appreciate the content.
    • 3/5
      Very interesting, but a little dry at times. Though, it's well worth the read as it's very important to understand the trials of women and black people. It's also a very good historical overview of NACA/NASA.

      I would highly recommend this for anyone interested in math, aeronautics, race relations, etc.
    • 5/5
      A very important story. Endlessly inspirational and magical. The author effortlessly weaves in a compelling civil rights narrative with surprisingly fascinating mathematical prowess. And, she does so in a way that evokes interest in a field that most consider rote and monotonous. My interest was peaked in the field, as well as my admiration for the story of ethnic minorities rising above a system designed to be pitted against them. Most importantly, the theme of rising above what seems, and very well might have been, impossible is a narrative everyone can cherish.
    • 4/5
      This is one of those fascinating bits of history that blows the doors off of our iconic cultural images of how things happened. My visions of the space age, shaped by the presentation given by the media, were of rows of white men sitting at banks of computers smoking nervously as they sent more white men off into the unknown. I never saw images of other types of people there, so I assumed that they weren't. Given our history as a country and the current state of affairs with sexism and segregation at the time, it seemed a reasonable assumption.This book was incredibly eye-opening not only in alerting me to the presence, influence, and contributions of women and blacks to the accomplishments of NASA, but also as to how much work went into it that I simply had never considered as a layperson. It never would have crossed my mind that you would need rooms of people doing math prior to the existence of modern computers. Nor quite how much math it takes to get something up into the air much less into space. I knew it was a lot, but I didn't realize it was a metric fuckton.A fascinating read. I look forward to watching the movie next.
    • 3/5
      I absolutely loved the movie and couldn't wait to read the book. It is full of facts and important information, but I sometimes found myself getting confused about the people I was reading about and found I absorbed more information when I read it during the day as opposed to before bed. It is a book that would be a wonderful resource to someone researching the time period or any of the topics covered in the book. A non-fiction read that will provide a clear picture of what NACA and NASA were like during the 1940s-1970s and I learned a lot about the black women (and women in general) who contributed so much to the space program.
    • 5/5
      Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race traces the women who worked first at NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, that later became NASA. Their work helped develop the planes that won World War II and the rockets that won the Space Race. In addition to tracing their scientific work, Shetterly examines the women’s lives in detail, discussing the educational opportunities they pursued in order to become mathematicians and engineers. Shetterly uses her subjects’ education and work as a case-study for desegregation in education and federal offices.Shetterly writes of postwar changes to federal offices, “Truman issued Executive Order 9980, sharpening the teeth of the wartime mandate that had helped bring West Area Computing into existence. The new law went further than the measure brought to life by A. Philip Randolph and President Roosevelt by making the heads of each federal department ‘personally responsible’ for maintaining a work environment free of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin” (pg. 104). Discussing the lines of segregation, Shetterly writes, “At Langley, the boundaries were fuzzier. Blacks were ghettoed into separate bathrooms, but they had also been given an unprecedented entrée into the professional world. Some of Goble’s colleagues were Yankees or foreigners who’d never so much as met a black person before arriving at Langley. Others were folks from the Deep South with calcified attitudes about racial mixing. It was all a part of the racial relations laboratory that was Langley, and it meant that both blacks and whites were treading new ground together” (pg. 123). Shetterly points out that Southern segregation limited options for both poor whites and African-Americans. She writes, “Throughout the South, municipalities maintained two parallel inefficient school systems, which gave the short end of the stick to the poorest whites as well as blacks. The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different” (pg. 145). Further, “As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms” (pg. 185). In this way, “Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth” (pg. 204).Shetterly brilliantly juxtaposes both the promise of American ingenuity and the cultural place of the space race against the reality of Jim Crow and racial violence. All those looking to reconcile the paradox of America must read this book. This Easton Press edition is gorgeously leather-bound with gilt page edges and signed by the author. It makes a lovely gift for recent college or university graduates studying history.
    • 2/5
      I love reading books about less commonly known people who contributed to the overall success of America. These amazing women, the unsung heroes of NASA, are just ordinary women doing extraordinary jobs. Let's back-track a bit. The Emancipation Proclamation filled the lives of all slaves and freedmen with hope for the future. The Civil War had ended less than 100 years earlier. Women got the vote in 1919. Yet despite these achievements, it's incredibly obvious that not enough has changed since then. Black people were still treated as inferior. It's sad that 1940's America still hadn't learned how to overcome the barriers of race AND gender. Americans were focused on winning the war, not quite focused on civil rights yet, but you know it's brewing. It's coming. It's a silent war that's about to erupt like a volcano.

      I'm disappointed with the style of the book. I was hoping for dialogue, a lot of it! I wanted to visualize these strong women, their plights, and their friendships, and their effectiveness as a group in the war effort. This book reads like a dry documentary. If I wanted a documentary, I'd turn on the television so I can listen to the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman.

      I read the prologue and the first six chapters (roughly 60 pages). I feel let down. I hope the movie is better than the book.
    • 4/5
      I have read a number of reviews annoyed about "history re-writes" like this one, and I find myself irrationally angry. Not once does this book even suggest that these women were the sole heroes of the space race or more important than the head engineers or astronauts whose names are well known.

      What is does do is tell the stories of one of the many groups that made American space travel possible, but whose stories you have likely not heard before. I love reading about the work struggles and triumphs and also personal lives of the many people surrounding a major historical event, not just the "key players". It provides the context and vibrancy to the event, and lets us see what life was like in that time and place for everyone who wasn't a famous white male.

      I'm not saying that John Glenn and Gene Kranz weren't vitally important to the space program. I just prefer to read broader histories of the program that include all the different jobs and people, rather than biographies of these select individuals. Hidden Figures gave me just that.
    • 4/5
      When I was younger, I had scrapbooks about the Apollo program. I sent my son to space camp, I followed so much about the race to space but I had never heard about these remarkable women. Hidden Figures tell the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African-American women who blazed the trail for others to follow in the fields of mathematics and engineering at NASA. There were many other women included in this book, but these were the main ones. This was a time of segregation, and there were no equal rights for women, let alone women of African American Heritage. In 1941 when so many men were gone to war, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) began hiring women as female computers. These women did the work of mathematicians but were considered subprofessionals in order to be paid less. When the demand for more "computers" could not be satisfied with white women, Langley began recruiting women from All Black colleges. Eventually with time, the Space Race came into play and NACA was renamed NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Agency). It was amazing the important role these women played and they were not well known at all.

      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.
    • 4/5
      Good historical information; insightful perspective from African American woman, interesting development of NASA
    • 4/5
      There can be no denying this book’s technical references left us all scratching our heads in muddled uncertainty, but then again, none of us claim to be even mediocre mathematicians. So it was decided that the importance of this book stretches past the NASA space race and even the gender gap that existed in the 1950s and 60s. Shetterly’s research into the ‘coloured’ computers that stoically worked under segregation at NASA and the larger community is unprecedented and cannot be downplayed in its significance to a new generation. The racism and segregation laws are far from a surprise to anyone, yet some of our group were newly appalled at how these women were treated and what they had to endure day after day, along with the low pay and lack of basic respect. Many works may have stopped there and rode the whole book on the racism card, but Shetterly goes further with the complete story on what it actually meant for these women to not only secure work at NASA, but to make the educational journey required to put them there. Nothing came easy to any of them and the struggle through the many obstacles laid before them (as women in the workforce) makes for an inspiring read and in our case, a great discussion. There are moments when you can find yourself bogged down in technical speak and bewildering facts and figures, but as a group we believe the book to be an extremely important record of a history that until now was little known. And the value of that alone cannot be discounted for future generations of both women and men.
    • 3/5
      Great story and I loved learning about these women. I was just expecting more of a Narrative Nonfiction rather than the facts and figures I got.
    • 4/5
      A well-written history of the black women behind the visible men of NASA, their lives and contributions to American progress, and a clear case for the ways that structural racism and segregation has held that progress back.
    • 5/5
      Really great story