Hidden figures

(Goodreads rating override: 4 stars for the importance of the content, not for how I “liked it”. I didn’t actually like it. More on that later.)

This is important material. And to the best of my knowledge, no other book covers half of this, so I’m going to say: read it. Don’t expect to enjoy it, and DON’T try the audiobook, but do read it. Please. We need you to. Because every reminder we get of the humiliations suffered by blacks in this country, every word that hits our hearts, every description of the putrid vile subhumans running Virginia in the fifties and sixties, is one more vote in November to oust the putrid vile subhumans running Washington today. (I write this in 2018 but by November I mean “every fucking November for the rest of your life”).

Hidden Figures is several books in one. Primarily it’s the story of the human “computers”—mostly Black women with highly advanced mathematical knowledge and skills—who invisibly and reliably made the calculations that resulted in not only the U.S. Space Program but also the aircraft that won WWII, the first supersonic flight, and the refinements that led to today’s commercial air travel. Also primarily it’s the story of racism, bigotry, hatred, and pure evil that still exists in the US today. Shetterly intertwines stories of the everyday hurdles that Blacks had to undergo, and she makes you feel them. All of this is important material.

Unfortunately, the book itself is less than readable. To borrow a line from my friend Chris, a line I fully intended to start with: “I so wanted to like this book.” I couldn’t. It’s choppy, clunky, awkwardly written. Intrusive similes; rococo language; jumpetyjumpy timeline with too many characters (major and minor). I started with the audiobook but gave it up; switched to ebook and still found myself struggling to keep track of who what when where. The material kept me going despite the writing.

The only distraction for me was the "relational" nature of the character introduction. Seeing the movie in the middle of the reading probably scalped half a point from my rating. However seeing the movie restored my focus on the main characters: Kathy Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. As an engineer, I was attracted to Mary's progress from computer to engineer and the barriers she had to break down. Allowing a personal note, the book also amplified something we learned in the late '70s: when computers became programmers of computers, engineers' first thought was computing is an engineering tool. My wife, at the UCCS and the Engineering Dept Head were the first to bring a computer scientist to the department. Dorothy's figuring out, on her own, to pick up FORTRAN and share it with West shows a lesson, an insight we need more of today. Katherine's expertise served her, and John Glenn well. I suspect her analytic geometry skill was an easier explain then the necessary skill of spherical trigonometry. (calculating a splash-down point to the last decimal in latitude, longitude). the book did a better job with that than the movie. Since i've made much reference to the movie, here's a map between the two. The movie picks up at the midpoint of the book, missing everything up to the choice of the Mercury astronauts. Hence, a number of milestones, advances made more on the initiative of the women are folded into the time-line of the movie, well after they occurred: Mary Jackson's admission to night school at Hampton High, Kathy's liberation from the "colored women restroom". The movie gives a comic scene of her scampering back and forth from color-absent Space group to the friendlier West Computing. The book offers a more subtle explanation: "since the rest room in the Space group said 'womens rest room' i assumed i wasn't excluded". And Dorothy's repeated petition for supervisor status are at least 4, 5 years later, not that it matters. The book doesn't disappoint. It's speaking right at me, since I'd have been one of the people who could have taken advantage of the computers' work. My disappointment is not having known of their work 45, 50 years ago.

What's the function of popular nonfiction? To inform? Entertain? Captivate? All 3? This book does the first well and the latter two terribly.

The information presented in this book is amazing. How did we ignore this piece of history so completely for so long? Why isn't "Katherine Johnson" a household name? Where was she in "Apollo 13"? The spectacular growth of aviation technology and ubiquity, the Cold War space race, the moon missions, the Space Shuttle -- these are so central to the sense of American identity that it is frankly shocking the West Computers were so completely erased from the narrative of 20th century American history. At this point I really shouldn't be surprised at the extent and the effects of systemic racism and sexism, and yet here I am, surprised again.

I pushed through because the history felt important and worth it. But I really did have to push through. Compelling writing this is not. I was --and remain, 2 years after the fact -- incredibly frustrated and disappointed that this book is so profoundly dull. It's organized poorly. It seems underwhelmed by its own subject. I've had more fun cleaning the bathroom.

Some random thoughts:

1. Not every hero is flashy. Anyone can take a small step, and together, small steps make a big difference. Miriam Mann's daily effort to get rid of the segregating lunch table sign was small but a critical step in organizational desegregation.

2. Once the trajectory from computer/mathematician (job without power) to engineer/research scientist (job with power) became better established, men started to seek these jobs as well, and women were pushed out of a field that they essentially created. No wonder there's such a dearth of women in STEM.

3. The book discusses a black male engineer who, as a man, had advantages women at NACA/NASA did not have; but he started drinking due to the challenges, and the stress, of being black in this segregated work environment. I wonder how many women -- black or white -- at NACA/NASA also developed self-injurious habits to help cope with a deeply segregated, sexist environment. It cannot be zero. However, the author does not speculate or even suggest that this might have been an issue; on the contrary, she pointedly notes of all the women under discussion in the book that they determinedly acted as role models in all aspects of their lives (girl scout leaders, guest lecturers, activists, church elders, etc in addition to their work as mathematicians).