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Hidden Figures
- The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space. Now a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.
Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets and astronauts into space.
Among these problem solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly these overlooked math whizzes had shots at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia, and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-Black West Computing group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War and complete domination of the heavens.
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the space race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades as they faced challenges, forged alliances, and used their intellects to change their own lives - and their country's future.
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One of the biggest questions listeners have when it comes to approaching a new audiobook is whether or not they'll enjoy the narration style. This is understandable, as audiobooks are at least a few hours long (with many clocking in at 20 hours long—or more!), and sticking with one person's voice for that time period can feel like a big commitment. We rounded up some of the best female narrators with a robust list of audiobooks under their belts.
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The Girls of Atomic City
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- By: Denise Kiernan
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, consuming more electricity than New York City. But to most of the world, the town did not exist. Thousands of civilians - many of them young women from small towns across the South - were recruited to this secret city, enticed by solid wages and the promise of war-ending work. Kept very much in the dark, few would ever guess the true nature of the tasks they performed each day in the hulking factories in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains.
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Important story of this secret city
- By CBlox on 11-14-13
By: Denise Kiernan
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Rise of the Rocket Girls
- The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars
- By: Nathalia Holt
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In the 1940s and '50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible.
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Struggles In Space Exploration
- By Sara on 06-11-16
By: Nathalia Holt
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Code Girls
- The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
- By: Liza Mundy
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Recruited by the US Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than 10,000 women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of codebreaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them.
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Just released, about 80% through this story
- By Roobah on 10-11-17
By: Liza Mundy
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Song in a Weary Throat
- Memoir of an American Pilgrimage
- By: Pauli Murray, Patricia Bell-Scott - Introduction by
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. Now Murray is finally getting long-deserved recognition: The first African American woman to receive a doctorate of law at Yale, her name graces one of the university's new colleges.
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great American shero
- By Coisge F Mccullough on 04-13-24
By: Pauli Murray, and others
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Shortest Way Home
- One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future
- By: Pete Buttigieg
- Narrated by: Pete Buttigieg
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Once described by The Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of", Pete Buttigieg, the 36-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a "dying city", and transformed it into a shining model of urban reinvention.
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Reveals a Person Wise & Experienced & Literate
- By dbbks3 on 03-17-19
By: Pete Buttigieg
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The Greatest Generation
- By: Tom Brokaw
- Narrated by: Tom Brokaw
- Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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In this superb audiobook, Tom Brokaw goes out into America to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation. America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by common values- duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself.
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Why abridged?
- By MacGyver124 on 02-24-17
By: Tom Brokaw
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109 East Palace
- Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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They were told as little as possible. Their orders were to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and report for work at a classified Manhattan Project site, a location so covert it was known to them only by the mysterious address: 109 East Palace.
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Great Listen
- By John H. Davis III on 10-22-05
By: Jennet Conant
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Trailblazer
- A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America
- By: Dorothy Butler Gilliam
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Dorothy Butler Gilliam, whose 50-year-career as a journalist put her in the forefront of the fight for social justice, offers a comprehensive view of racial relations and the media in the US.
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Struggled to finish
- By SL41639 on 04-06-20
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Boyd
- The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
- By: Robert Coram
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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John Boyd may be the most remarkable unsung hero in all of American military history. Some remember him as the greatest US fighter pilot ever - the man who, in simulated air-to-air combat, defeated every challenger in less than 40 seconds. Some recall him as the father of our country's most legendary fighter aircraft - the F-15 and F-16. Still, others think of Boyd as the most influential military theorist since Sun Tzu. They know only half the story.
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Stick With It if You Want a Rare Gem
- By Michael Richards on 08-30-16
By: Robert Coram
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God Is in the Crowd
- Twenty-First-Century Judaism
- By: Tal Keinan
- Narrated by: Tal Keinan
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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God Is in the Crowd is an original and provocative blueprint for Judaism in the 21st century. Presented through the lens of Tal Keinan’s unusual personal story, it a sobering analysis of the threat to Jewish continuity. As the Jewish people has become concentrated in just two hubs - America and Israel - it has lost the subtle code of governance that endowed Judaism with dynamism and relevance in the age of Diaspora.
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Visionary Prescription for World Jewry
- By Craig R Weiss on 10-01-18
By: Tal Keinan
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Tuxedo Park
- A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: John Kroft
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.
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Fantastic book, weak technical execution
- By Paul on 10-13-18
By: Jennet Conant
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First Man
- The Life of Neil A. Armstrong
- By: James R. Hansen
- Narrated by: Jeremy Bobb
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon’s surface in 1969, the first man on the Moon became a legend. In First Man, author James R. Hansen explores the life of Neil Armstrong. Based on over 50 hours of interviews with the intensely private Armstrong, who also gave Hansen exclusive access to private documents and family sources, this "magnificent panorama of the second half of the American twentieth century" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) is an unparalleled biography of an American icon.
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Not really 'unabridged'
- By A Reader on 06-06-18
By: James R. Hansen
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The Prize
- Who's in Charge of America's Schools?
- By: Dale Russakoff
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools - and to solve the education crisis in every city in America - it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their plans soon ran into a constituency not so easily moved - Newark's key education players, fiercely protective of their billion-dollar-per-annum system.
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Well-researched - Provides Good Answers
- By Denyse on 01-11-16
By: Dale Russakoff
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Recruited by the US Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than 10,000 women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of codebreaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them.
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Just released, about 80% through this story
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Ask an Astronaut
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Based on his historic mission to the International Space Station, Ask an Astronaut is Tim Peake's guide to life in space and his answers to the thousands of questions he has been asked since his return to Earth. With explanations ranging from the mundane (how do you wash your clothes or go to the bathroom while in orbit?) to the profound (do humans have a duty to explore the unknown?), all written in Tim's characteristically warm style, Tim shares his thoughts on every aspect of space exploration.
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Inspiring
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The Pearl Thief
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From the internationally acclaimed best-selling author of Code Name Verity comes a stunning new story of pearls, love and murder. Sixteen-year-old Julie Beaufort-Stuart is returning to her family's ancestral home in Perthshire for one last summer. It is not an idyllic return to childhood. Her grandfather's death has forced the sale of the house and estate, and this will be a summer of good-byes. Not least to the McEwen family - Highland travellers who have been part of the landscape for as long as anyone can remember.
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Freshwater Pearls and Scottish Plaid
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What listeners say about Hidden Figures
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ronald
- 09-29-16
Good story, poorly written.
This is based on the story of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor agency in the 50s 60s and 70s. It's a really good story, but the writing is full of clichés extended metaphors and and digressions which seem to be random and detract from the overall flow of the narrative. It's a shame.
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- Ashley E Rose
- 02-03-17
Time exceptionally well spent
The book provides much greater scope and historical context than movie, as well done as it was.
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- Kojo
- 01-26-17
History often holds great Stories
I got this boom after seeing the movie, wanting the added details I knew the film had to skip or compress. I wasn't disappointed.
I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in the history of America's technological development, especially as it pertains to our space program or our terrestrial aeronautics industry.
I'd also recommend it to anyone from an underrepresented group that's looking to get into a tech-based career. The people highlighted here had it MUCH harder than we do in 2017, and they succeeded at VERY high levels. But not without a LOT of hard work and perseverance, even in the face of overwhelming odds.
The narrator did an excellent job and never seemed "in the way" of the story being told.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Sam
- 05-30-17
A good editor would have made a big difference
Any additional comments?
This is an important story that needed to be told, and clearly Ms. Shetterly did the research. The book is about racial prejudice in the late 50s, but it's also about black women and their contribution to the space race. While she is a good wordsmith, the story lacked continuity. To me it seemed like a series of unconnected vignettes, and we never see a map as to where we're going. Moreover, I never cared about the characters, i.e. there was no development. What was needed was for someone to edit the book so that Ms. Shetterly's considerable writing talent could be properly presented and appreciated. In this instance, the movie was much better than the book since it told a story, and one could not help rooting for the characters.
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- Rocky Sunico
- 12-14-18
An Important Story That Needed To Be Told
What I Liked: The level of detail that goes into this book is pretty phenomenal as it covers a lot of stories throughout the history of pretty much modern aviation and the space program. But instead of focusing on the big heroes in the sky, we're in a building following the lives of women running math computations at desks. And the book manages to make this work sound incredibly exciting without actually going too deep into the math itself.
And the book really does a lot to talk about these women not just as parts of a larger machine but as people. So we come to better appreciate the challenges of their daily commute or the casual discrimination they experienced at the cafeteria and all the other complications of being an African-American woman in that period. Thus the book manages to convey some very important ideas that really need to be talked about more when it comes to racism, the role of women and other things.
What Could Have Been Better: The ebb and flow of this narrative is a rather organic one, especially since it's not focused on the live of just one Human Computer but a good number of them. And the level of detail I spoke about earlier means a lot of different people that you need to keep track of, which can be a little dizzying as an audiobook experience.
The book has a lot to say but a times it feels like they have just a little too much to talk about to manage effectively. The main historical arc about the contribution of these women to the space program is already a very big thing to cover. But so is the civil rights struggle and the fight for equality for women. I'm not saying they should have disregarded these other topics but at times it does feel like not all of these subjects are given the weight and importance of these big ticket items. It's a lot to ask from any author.
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- Michelle Reynolds
- 07-17-17
Little Black History Facts
This book is full of black history facts that our kids will never learn in k-12. I was so overwhelmed by the stories in this book. Many thanks to the author.
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- Kate Gibbons
- 09-13-17
I guess I will rent the movie
I listen to several chapters in their family gave up. I don't know whether it was the reader or maybe this book just does not lend itself well to being read aloud. The story was interesting, but listening to it read in a rather monotone voice bored me until I could listen no more. But I actually think I will enjoy the movie.
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- Chanda Stone
- 03-19-17
Amazing
I really enjoyed this book! I love history and especially Herstory. For too long the contribution to our nation by people of color and women has been overshadowed or ignored. I think everyone should read this book. I am going to have my Girl Scout troop read it and watch the movie. Plus my book group is reading it next month on my suggestion. Listen to it!
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- flowermama
- 04-18-17
Narrative, not a Novel
Very good narrative of the history of black and white women in the history of NASA. Not entertaining enough to keep the listener awake in the car (I had to alternate with a novel). Still, it's worth the listen.
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- Donna McL
- 02-16-17
Wonderful insight into history unknown
I thoroughly enjoyed, and, at times, reveled in the memories of our American history while listening to this book. I do, however, have to say, as a woman--and I am a white woman reared in the South, I cheered and was so proud to see the achievements made. I will also honestly say it opened my eyes to some things I am not proud of in my heritage. I came from a different kind of Southern family, very open to others culturally but, unfortunately sensitive to them as well. What I learned on my grandfather's lap was to treat others as I wished to be treated and to help the less fortunate, never forgetting where we came from. Did we always do what was right? I don't think so but that attitude and lesson is still passed on in our family. I do have memories as a small child watching the lunar landings and watching those first moon steps. I am proud to finally have more insight and knowledge into that process and so appreciate the effort and knowledge provided by these women and men. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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