Too many facts, not enough story
Bewertet mit 3 Sternen
I’ve always wanted to see this movie since it came out in 2017, but never came around to it.
But right on time for the 50th anniversary of the landing on the moon, the movie had its premiere on TV. Since I got this book from a friend only a couple of weeks ago, I assumed it’s the perfect time to read this before then watching the movie. Since I’ve also recently watched a very thorough 3-part-documentary on NASAs way to the moon I knew about the important aeronautical milestones already, which definitely helped.
The author Margot Lee Shetterly herself was born 3 weeks before the famous Apollo 11 mission in Hampton, Virginia. Her father (an African-American) worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center, where the story is set. But even with all this ‘inside knowledge’, Margot learned about the large number of African-American women working for NASA from as early as the 1940s as “computers in skirts” only in 2010. Then she devoted several years of her time to accumulate lots and lots of facts from various sources. She even had the opportunity to interview Katherine Johnson, one of the most prominent of these women, herself since 100-year-old Katherine is still alive even today.
The result is a book full of information on the situation of African-American people in the United States since World War II, specifically in Virginia, on segregation, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War and Americas race to space with the Soviets. All of this takes up a considerable part of the book. And while it certainly all is interesting, I had the feeling that Shetterly repeats herself too often. After a while it was just more of the same.
In between we also learn about the women at the West Area Computers division, mainly about Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Goble, later Johnson (and to a minor degree also about Mary Jackson and 2 others). We get to know them a bit from a personal point of view and also follow their career at Langley. Small anecdotes are included, like taking down the “Coloured” sign in the cafeteria day after day or the long walk to a bathroom suitable for Mary (in the movie it is Katherine) once she got promoted to somewhere else. But it was all written in a way that did not really grip me. Like I already said, it felt more like an accumulation of facts rather than a story.