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.