Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2017I wanted to read this book based on the excellent reviews of book and movie. I wanted to love this book. I planned to love this book. Instead, I found myself avoiding my reading time (I think I will clean under the refrigerator!) because I was not excited about this book. I contemplated not finishing it. The book contains some of my favorite themes like people fighting for equality, smart women, and the power of talent and perseverance. It is possible that this was just the wrong book at the wrong time for me.
The book begins during WWII and moves through the space race. NACA (now NASA) in Hampton Virginia was hiring mathematicians to improve fighter planes. Since most men were fighting in the war, the Langley lab was hiring anyone with math skills--even African American women. These young ladies loved math and science and were fighting to be educated at "colored" colleges. There most likely career path was as teachers. Because of Jim Crow laws, the women were segregated in their offices, the cafeteria, and of course the restrooms. Langley also build segregated housing to accommodate the new hires. The book specifically profiles four of these women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson (the most well-known for her work on the Apollo space ship) and Christine Darden. They fought for advancement and equal treatment and earned respect with their intelligence and determination.
This sounds so good, but I was disappointed. I was hoping for a more in depth look at the early personal lives of the women and more details about their day to day work life and interactions with male coworkers. The women never came to life for me. I know that this is a work of non-fiction, but fact does not have to be boring. Hidden Figures, especially in the first third of the book, contained a lot of detail on math and physics, how planes fly, and the nuances of sending a man to the moon. To be fair, aeronautics and physics have never interested me, so I personally found those sections both dull and too inclusive. I skimmed a lot. As I was reading this, I kept making the comparison to Boys in the Boat. This is a non-fiction book about rowing crew, another thing that does not really interest me. That book had long sections about the precision required to both build and man one of those boats. In contrast, I found that fascinating. I think the difference is that Boys in the Boat told the personal stories of the "boys" and the writing style was gorgeous and evocative.
Hidden Figures is well written and thoroughly researched by an author who is passionate about her subject. I did enjoy the historical perspective. I grew up in Virginia during the mid-1960's through the early 1980's and I remember some of these things. I was particularly interested in the path toward desegregation. The author puts this into the context of occurring during the Cold War. She implies that desegregation occurred in part, not because it was the right thing to do, but because it would make the US look better to other nations with predominately non-white populations. I always appreciate it when an author gives me a new perspective or a different way to think about something. In conclusion, there were some good bits, but overall, this was not the book for me.
