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gordonwaddell 's review for:
I listened to this audio book in a few days and enjoyed it. It is an unabashedly opinionated story of the women of JPL in the small town of Pasadena contributing to the invention of rocketry and space exploration as we know it today.
The reviews on this book are pretty mixed, and probably reveals a lot about both the reader and the expectations on the story.
We do have a primarily female oriented view of the world, the trials and tribulations of the main characters are set in the harsh world or unfair rights and expectations, and the male and corporate view of them at various times (titles, attitudes, maternity leave etc) are true to form and not something that would leap out in any other story of the same situation.
However the author does no favors in a number of ways - everyone is pretty, there is a lot of focus on dress, and apart from an early mention of the first African-American hire there is no racial byline in a wholly gender focused story. This threw me, as I felt there is more there, and like many I found this book via [b: Hidden Figures|30840370|Hidden Figures The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation into Space|Margot Lee Shetterly|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474752658s/30840370.jpg|55627110]. In some ways it emphasizes the rarity of the Hidden Figures as a minority within a minority. As an audio book it was also pretty difficult to follow the various story arcs of the main women in the story - due to some time leaps and interweaving it was sometimes configuring when someone left to have a baby and returned to work later after two, for instance.
The whole arc of JPL is fascinating, and the the contributions of the computers and engineers who made it happen are detailed in just the right level of abstraction (description of computer languages seem a little dated, but the treatment of FORTRAN etc is excellent). I don’t know if there is rosy twist on the move away from weaponry development to space, or if it was the true feeling of the lab, and the change in narrative tone on von Braun was a little disappointing, but the pacing - with more focus on 50’s and early 60’s and then a light coverage of the 70’s through (almost) present day meant that a lot of ground was covered.
The epilogue ties off the book nicely.
The reviews on this book are pretty mixed, and probably reveals a lot about both the reader and the expectations on the story.
We do have a primarily female oriented view of the world, the trials and tribulations of the main characters are set in the harsh world or unfair rights and expectations, and the male and corporate view of them at various times (titles, attitudes, maternity leave etc) are true to form and not something that would leap out in any other story of the same situation.
However the author does no favors in a number of ways - everyone is pretty, there is a lot of focus on dress, and apart from an early mention of the first African-American hire there is no racial byline in a wholly gender focused story. This threw me, as I felt there is more there, and like many I found this book via [b: Hidden Figures|30840370|Hidden Figures The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation into Space|Margot Lee Shetterly|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474752658s/30840370.jpg|55627110]. In some ways it emphasizes the rarity of the Hidden Figures as a minority within a minority. As an audio book it was also pretty difficult to follow the various story arcs of the main women in the story - due to some time leaps and interweaving it was sometimes configuring when someone left to have a baby and returned to work later after two, for instance.
The whole arc of JPL is fascinating, and the the contributions of the computers and engineers who made it happen are detailed in just the right level of abstraction (description of computer languages seem a little dated, but the treatment of FORTRAN etc is excellent). I don’t know if there is rosy twist on the move away from weaponry development to space, or if it was the true feeling of the lab, and the change in narrative tone on von Braun was a little disappointing, but the pacing - with more focus on 50’s and early 60’s and then a light coverage of the 70’s through (almost) present day meant that a lot of ground was covered.
The epilogue ties off the book nicely.