Monday, February 25, 2019

Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space- Margot Lee Shetterly



Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space by Margot Lee Shetterly has been on my radar for a while. It's been front and center on bookstore tables, on display at the library, and I think I've seen it on just about every book blog out there. And don't forget the movie, which was wonderful (and I'm usually not a fan of anything dealing with space. Too many chances for things to go wrong and for the astronauts to get lost up there. Anxiety!). I'd always planned on reading it, but I never thought I'd get to it so soon (more on that later).

During World War II, the NACA (the agency that would eventually become NASA) needed calculations done for the research and construction of new aircraft, and a large number of those doing the calculations (by hand, of course!) were black female mathematicians. Making what was a good salary at the time, these women worked long days, often into the night, churning out packets of sophisticated equations, often without full knowledge of what they were working on or what the final results of the project ended up being. And they did it all in a world that, up until this point, had steadfastly refused to acknowledge their talents and successes solely due to the color of their skin.

Ms. Shetterly tells the story of women like Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden, painting a picture of their lives both before and after coming to the NACA, and the times they lived in. Even as these women were filling pages after page with face-melting math, black soldiers in uniform were being spit on by their fellow Americans and being refused service in restaurants. As they calculated trajectories and handed in the scores of math that would make military victory (and eventually space flight) possible, people who looked like them were still being told to sit at the back of the bus. Before coming to the NACA, one of the women featured made less as a teacher than the white janitor who cleaned her school (something like $850 per year; the starting salary at the NACA was $2,000). The discrepancy between what these women had to offer and how their 'grateful' nation treated people who looked like them is nothing short of infuriating, and for that reason alone, this book is a must-read.

But the book goes beyond that and celebrates the lives of women who were remarkable by any standards, and even more so due to the fact that they were able to rise far beyond the limits their country set for them. This is a story of exceptional accomplishment in the face of institutional adversity, and it'll force you to examine exactly what we as a country are throwing away, what we might have had but chose not to, when we do things like underfund schools and condemn children in impoverished neighborhoods to subpar education.

So many times during this book, I had to stop and seethe at how hard the women had to struggle in order to access what they needed to be able to contribute to society. What on earth are we thinking when we make things more difficult for people to access education? And on that note, quite a few times I had to read certain sentences multiple times in order to get the basic gist of what Ms. Shetterly was saying. Math and science were never my thing (hence the book blog and not, say, an illustrious career in a STEM field), but whew, the complexities of what the women in this book were doing every single day were utterly mind-blowing. Man, am I glad that there are people out there who can do that kind of stuff, and I wish our country invested more in education so that the accomplishments of the women of Hidden Figures were without the fierce battle it took for them to get there.

I picked this book up on Friday thanks to the library book discussion group I attended on Thursday (which was AWESOME!!!! I loved it so, so much and I'm already signed up for next month). The librarian who led it was talking about BookRiot's 2019 Read Harder Challenge, and while I've normally shied away from most challenges in the past, with the exception of this year's Modern Mrs. Darcy Challenge, attending this discussion gave me the confidence to take on the Read Harder Challenge. If I don't complete it, that's okay, and at least I'll have read some amazing new authors and books along the way, but I've got my eye on the goal here. Reading Hidden Figures was my first read for this, and it checks off #6, a book by an AOC set in or about space. I'm off to an amazing start.


Have you read Hidden Figures? How do you deal with the anger and frustration you feel when you read about how our country has treated and still treats people of color?


Visit Margot Lee Shetterly's website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.



8 comments:

  1. Well I haven't read Hidden Figures and haven't watched the movie but I have heard about both. What extraordinary women. Unfortunately your country is not the only one to show such racism, we are all tarred by it. All the best with the harder Reading Challenge. I must take a look at it, just to see!!

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    1. Oh, I know. Everywhere has its problems, and racism is so pointless! It's so sad to see that we (meaning everyone) are so eager to discount another person's potential solely based on the color of their skin or their culture. What deep losses and chances for growth we've all suffered because of this!

      The Read Harder Challenge is INTENSE! I'm SO excited about the opportunities to check out new-to-me writers and genres!!!

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  2. It's such a shame the way women, and especially women of color, were and in many ways still are treated in this country (and many other for that matter). I've thought about reading this one, as I've heard many good things about it and the film (which my daughter has been asking to watch). You've definitely whet my appetite!

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    1. I'm glad I could help! :) The movie is really wonderful. I actually think that this is one case where you should see the movie FIRST, and then read the book. There's a lot of technical stuff going on in the book, and I think it helps to have a mental picture of what's going on when you dig into the details of the book. :)

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  3. Such amazing women! I am glad their stories are finally being told. I read this right before the movie came out, and then saw the movie in the theater. I much prefer to read the book first if I can, and am glad I did in this case given how much they changed between the two. This book made me angry too--on the part of women in general and especially for women of color. The Hate U Give was one of those books too that made me so angry as I read it.

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    1. The Hate U Give was SO good! I'm so looking forward to her next one, On the Come Up. I'm on the list at the library for that.

      The scene in the movie with the colored bathrooms being so far away made me unbelievably angry and was an excellent highlight of the straight-up BS of segregation. I'm so glad these amazing women are finally receiving the attention they've deserved for so long!

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  4. I enjoyed the Hidden Figures movie, but I STILL haven't read the book. It's sitting on my shelf, so hopefully I'll get to it sooner rather than later. Glad you enjoyed it!

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    1. It's a great read. I'm surprised I was able to get through it as fast as I did, since I had to keep stopping to reread the more technical parts! :D

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