Review
Author: Margot Lee Shetterly
Reviewed by: SHA
Issue: June 2017
We thought that Hidden Figures, nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, was the best movie we saw last year and wanted to read the book to see just how the screenwriter treated the source material. The verdict? The storyline essentially tracks the book but there were obvious embellishments in the movie to build drama and stimulate interest. The movie, in this case, had more punch than the book. The author's father, a 40-year employee of what is now NASA's Langley Research Center, sparked her interest when he told her about the black ("colored" then) women employees that had worked at Langley beginning in 1943. She noted that, after her research for this book she could put names to at least fifty black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists at Langley from 1943 to 1980. Even more than the large numbers of black women "hiding" in this world of white males, was the incredible body of work they left behind. Shetterly interviewed African-American physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson (now 98) who calculated trajectories, launch windows, and return paths for John Glenn and Alan Shepard as well as for the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon. Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and, in 2016 a new building was named the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at Langley. That Johnson and the other black women at NASA could achieve what they did in the face of the overt racism at the time make their accomplishments even more notable, setting the tone for the advancement of other African-American women. The three principal women in the move, Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson were played by Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Jonelle Monae respectively, and Spencer won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Great story and a wonderful movie about race and scientific accomplishments.