Please note: This is an analysis and key takeaways of the book and not the original book.

Start Publishing Notes' Summary, Analysis, and Review of Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race includes a summary of the book, review, analysis and key takeaways, and a detailed "about the author" section.

Preview: Hidden Figures begins with a prologue recounting author Margot Lee Shetterly's childhood in Hampton, Virginia. Her father worked for National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Langley Research Center, and Shetterly was surrounded by an upwardly mobile black community. Given her father's job as a climate scientist and the similarly successful lives of her extended family, Shetterly experienced a comfortable middle-class upbringing removed from the palpable pain and strife that has engulfed so many other black communities in America. As she writes, Shetterly "knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did." As Shetterly grew up and left Hampton, she became fascinated by the people she had grown up with and the individuals her father had once mentioned in passing. The popular conception of NASA was that of an organization staffed almost uniformly by white men; so who were the people that Shetterly's father had worked with, and where were they now?