Hidden Figures

Margot Lee Shetterly “Hidden Figures,”  Harper, 2016 Large Print Paperback, 436 pp.

I recommend seeing the movie before reading this book—that’s a first.  This book is not a novel: it is more of a documentary that ultimately served as the source material (maybe inspiration is a better word) for the movie.  Of course when you later read the book you will notice that the movie has created composite characters as well as fictional scenes to carry the story in an allowable time-span.  To get the real facts, read the book; but the movie is essentially correct in spirit if not in fact. Yet, most people will only see the movie and conclude that it is literally factual.  Two of the most iconic scenes in the movie never happened: Katherine’s need to run between buildings to find a colored bathroom and the associated knocking down the bathroom sign…. and That’s my problem with this book/then movie.

The story is truly important and I don’t like important stories fictionalized, even well intended it might be.  Especially when the fictionalized portions are truly iconic moments.

This is the story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped facilitate some of America’s greatest achievements in space. This group of female mathematicians, known as “human computers,” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.  Hidden Figures follows the accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades.