I'm doing this backwards: I watched the film first. It was excellent - I laughed, I cried, I realized how little I actually knew about the history of our space program (definitely sat through the part with Alan Shepherd's launch like "... did he die? God, I can't remember.") It has been mentioned, and it is certainly true, that there was too much pandering to the white viewers; Costner's character played the liberal-minded White Knight to Katherine's distress over the substandard conditions of the "separate but equal" regulations. In this novel, we find that Katherine Goble Johnson did not spend her days running to an entire other wing to use the designated bathrooms - she simply used the closest women's room, segregation be damned.

In that way, this book is an excellent complement to the film experience, as it gives us so much more information on the life of Katherine, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughn and many others who were not featured by name in the film at all. The author grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where her father was a scientist for NASA. He kickstarts her interest in the area by simply trying to bond with her fiance through local history and starts her on a five year journey of research on one of America's (many) untold tales of achievement by women of color.

Shetterly begins the tale with a striking statement:

Women occupied many of the cubicles [at NASA]; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.

Her enthusiasm fairly jumps off the page; it bolstered me when she would edge into speaking on the mathematical, engineering and physics specialties Mary and the others enthusiastically tackled. As Barbie once said, "Math class is tough!"- I struggle to focus even on the generalities Shetterly outlines. My awe of their talents and hard work knows no bounds.

Shetterly wove in the history of the war, segregation and Virginia's Jim Crow laws in and around the stories of these extraordinary women, sometimes more deftly than others. This knowledge rounded out the full scope of their achievements in a world that fully believed them to be less than what they knew they could be. In her own words: "... the story of the West Computers is so electrifying because it provides evidence of something that we've believed to be true, that we want with our entire beings to be true, but that we don't always know how to prove: that many numbers of black women have participated as protagonists in the epic of America."