Editors Reads Verdict
Margot Lee Shetterly's meticulously researched history recovers the forgotten stories of women like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson — Black mathematicians whose indispensable contributions to American space exploration were hidden by both racism and sexism for decades.
What We Loved
- The historical research is exceptional — Shetterly spent years in archives recovering these stories
- The individual portraits are vivid without being romanticized
- The intersection of the Space Race, civil rights movement, and World War II creates a rich historical canvas
- The book corrects a significant omission from American scientific and cultural history
Minor Drawbacks
- The large cast of characters can make tracking individuals challenging
- Some readers find the historical detail dense relative to the narrative momentum
- The film adaptation streamlined the story in ways that illuminate how much complexity Shetterly's book contains
Key Takeaways
- → Excellence can survive in impossible circumstances but it requires more than excellence — it requires luck and allies
- → Systemic racism and sexism create invisible costs that are visible only when the record is corrected
- → The most important historical actors are often the least documented
- → Intelligence and ambition navigate institutional barriers in specific, particular ways that deserve specific record
- → The story of American achievement is inseparable from the story of American exclusion
| Author | Margot Lee Shetterly |
|---|---|
| Publisher | William Morrow |
| Pages | 346 |
| Published | September 6, 2016 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | History, Non-Fiction, Biography |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Readers interested in American history, the Space Race, Black women's history, and the intersection of civil rights and scientific progress. |
The Computers Who Were Human
At NASA’s Langley Research Center during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the term “computer” referred to a person — specifically, to the teams of women who performed the mathematical calculations that engineers needed. Among these women were a group of Black mathematicians whose work was indispensable to American aviation and space research, and whose contributions were systematically obscured by both the racial segregation of the era and the institutional invisibility of women’s intellectual labor.
Margot Lee Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, near Langley, and knew some of these women as members of her parents’ social circle. Her book recovers their stories through years of archival research, interviews, and the reconstruction of a historical world that had been essentially erased from the official record.
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson
The three central figures who anchor the narrative each represent different aspects of the Black female mathematician’s experience at Langley:
Katherine Johnson’s mathematical intuition was so precise that John Glenn, before his 1962 orbital flight, refused to proceed until she personally verified the IBM computer’s calculations. Her orbital mechanics work is now celebrated, but for decades it was classified and she was uncredited.
Dorothy Vaughan became NASA’s first Black supervisor in 1949, teaching herself FORTRAN when she understood that electronic computers would replace human ones — and teaching her entire team, ensuring their survival in the transition.
Mary Jackson became the first Black female engineer at NASA after petitioning to take the advanced engineering courses held in Virginia’s segregated school system.
The Double Burden
Shetterly is meticulous about the specific texture of what these women navigated: the segregated bathroom in the main building, the “Colored Computers” designation that separated them from white mathematicians doing the same work, the social navigation required to be taken seriously in an environment that had structural reasons not to take them seriously.
Their achievements were not achieved despite their circumstances — they were achieved by women who understood their circumstances completely and found specific, intelligent strategies for doing what they needed to do within them.
The Film and the Book
The 2016 film adaptation, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, introduced these stories to an enormous audience. The film necessarily simplified and dramatized Shetterly’s more complex historical account. Both are valuable; neither is sufficient without the other.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — An essential historical recovery: the stories of women whose mathematics helped launch America into space, finally told with the detail and respect they have always deserved.
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