I remember seeing the (excellent) film of this when it came out, and I made a note back then to read the book one day. It's been years, but I've finally done it. No surprise that it's more informative than the film - at a densely packed 300+ pages it can hardly help being so - and it took a while for me to get through it. There's just so much information here, and I kept stopping reading to go to the internet and look things up, which, honestly, is the mark of an interesting story as far as I'm concerned.

There's a note towards the back, from the author, which comments that the women described here are not so much hidden figures as unseen ones. In the history of science they are not alone in that, unfortunately. The visibility of books like this, though, and the subsequent movement of its subjects from unseen to seen can only be a boon in the democratisation of science. Scientists aren't a monolith. They need to be diverse, not only in order to ensure that everyone has a chance to practice science, but to ensure that science isn't held back by the refusal to include intelligent people regardless of gender or race. Think of how much further we'd be ahead if so many people, through history, hadn't been barred from full contribution and their own individual potential!

Fascinating book. I read an ebook edition from the public library, though, and I wish it had included photographs. Did the print editions? I don't know, but it could have used them.