Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2017This needs to be mandatory reading for every child in America before going to high school, but especially for every black girl. Of course, not everybody can be a NASA mathematician, engineer, or scientist, and astronaut may be a defunct career, but whatever anyone wants to be in life, this book will inspire them to pursue their goals and never let any external circumstances or obstacles keep them from achieving success. I'm happy to see that there is a Young Reader's Edition of the book now.
It is true that the writing gets a bit bogged down in details at times, and some of the stories around the main subject matter are a bit disjointed. In particular, the story about Mary Jackson helping her son Levi with his soap box derby project in chapter nineteen breaks off partway through to focus on Mary at work, then picks up the narrative about the derby many pages later. And that chapter does not reach a real conclusion. But the criticisms of the book in some of the negative reviews here on Amazon are unwarranted. It is a fascinating account of a side of NASA that I not only never heard of while growing up in the 60s and 70s, but I never even suspected existed.
Imagine if in all three seasons of Star Trek, the original series with Captain Kirk, every time the camera was on Lieutenant Uhura, her image had been edited out, and all of her lines of dialog had been displayed as subtitles instead of us hearing her. Then imagine that only now, for the first time, a fully-restored version of those episodes were released, and finally we could be see and hear the amazing and capable black woman working as an equal among equals on the bridge of the Enterprise.
That is the impact of this story on me, and on countless others.
Read this book. If it takes longer than you're used to for a book this long, bear with it. It's worth it, I assure you.
The movie is wonderful, but as it says on the poster, the film is based on a true story. This book is the true story. I recommend experiencing both. The movie for its emotional impact, and the book for the full untold story, only a fraction of which made it up on the big screen.
