Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

For my young reader, at least, it was a huge success

Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition by Margot Lee Shetterly

by 4 Comments

I’ve been struggling all summer to find a book to read with my 8 year old. He’s a smart kid, but he’s not really all that interested in the things I remember being into as a kid. I keep trying books I grew up on, and he’s not really been interested in any of them. That may be a maturity thing, though. I didn’t really get into reading until I was in middle school. But he loves math. At the end of last year, he […]

YAAAAAAS

by Leave a Comment

The wonderful thing about library books is there are so many possibilities. The bad thing about library books is there is so little time. A book is delivered to my Kindle and I have 3 weeks in which to read it. Library books take precedence over owned books, you see. Which is why it’s taken me over a year to finish Hidden Figures. There was just always a library book. Thank god for lulls because ugh this book is amazing. And it is dense. I found it […]

Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race

by Leave a Comment

The story of the women from Hidden Figures has had many written formats as well as a film dedicated to telling about the lives of these amazing women. These were women who helped changed history by changing the world of male-dominated-science, the space program, women’s rights and the rights of African Americans. History of NASA, the space program and even the term computer are introduced while introducing a younger audience to Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden. Women who were good at […]

The women behind the space program

by Leave a Comment

Between the movie and the New York Times Bestseller list, Hidden Figures (2016) by Margot Lee Shetterly had generated a fair bit of buzz. I knew I wanted to read it. It was just a matter of getting it from the library when everyone else wanted it too. I knew going in that this book focused on the contribution that black women made in the space race. This knowledge came solely from the film preview, but I was interested in reading the source material. I still haven’t […]

What comes first: the movie or the book?

by 2 Comments

I have to admit that I have not yet seen the movie, although I heard about it before I knew there was a book. I was planning to see the movie when it came out on DVD and now it has, except now I worry about what the movie does to the book. It’s a dilemma. Hidden Figures is a good book, and a fairly easy read. For a book about mathematicians, it’s not too technical, but it has enough detail about the math and […]

Hidden Figures

by Leave a Comment

Hidden Figures details the lives of the African American women who were the computers for NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA. Before reading this, I assumed that these women were relatively young and fresh out of college without families of there own, but I quickly learned that this was not true. One of the first women we meet is married with children of her own. She’s a teacher (as some of the other women are) and took extra jobs to […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo