The relationship between book and movie here demonstrates a fine line between historical fiction and historical reference. The book seems to demonstrate NACA suffered from systemic racism and worked hard over the 20th century to integrate and excel.
For example inside NACA, one of the few black male engineers' experiments was sabotaged by southern mechanical lab assistants. However, the very next scene illustrates the saboteur being reprimanded. Outside NACA, the school system and the state of Virginia resisted integration so intensely, certain areas of the state canceled public school for up to five years. While the book does illustrate how progressive NACA was for the time, it doesn't gloss over the fact that Langley, VA was in the segregated south so issues were bound to arise. In the book, society outside of NACA demonstrated larger threats of segregation than the workforce of NACA, who were largely a diverse mix of demographics which included Americans from the Northern states, Jewish people, middle-class southern folk, black people, and others.
Speaking of adding flavor, for a good three quarters of the book, I was strongly preferred the movie, because the story was more focused, but once I hit chapter 14, I realized the movie exaggerated certain elements of the book to simplify the plot structure, to appeal to a wider audience, and to make the workforce appear to be more prejudice than they were in the book. These literary devices were interesting to me because they seasoned an otherwise dry book with a bit more flavor. While I am not sure I agree with this allusion, it was an interesting section that made me think for a while. This compares prejudices in the workplace to McCarthyism for both white and black people. While describing the end of segregation in the workplace the author explains “the insecurity of black people as they tried to figure out the new languages and customs of integrated life” and goes on to compare how it was a change of the black community to learn when a subtle glance was just a glance or when it meant something more. Early on in the book, Dorthy Vaughn, on her first day at NACA, is struck by how the sound of the computing machines in the mathematics room sounded like a symphony.Ī second example happens when on Katherine’s first day in a new unit and a coworker gives her a bit of an odd look. As a government employee in an engineering agency, I found I identified with this story and found the information to be written similarly to how we write our reports - factual and to the point.ĭespite the writing feeling a bit technical at times, I found the author’s use of literary devices were peppered throughout the book. Before chapter 19, the book talks about the history of black people and women in NACA until the mid-1950s when it would become NASA. The plot of the book felt more like exposition until chapter 19, when first Katherine goes to NACA. While reading the book, at first I was very frustrated with these difference in a non-fiction story. Katherine later was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Like Mary, Katherine was involved in Girl Scouts, volunteering, her sorority charter, college and NACA sports teams, and was one of the only females and one of the only black people at industry conferences. Katherine is a very compelling person to read about as well because when her first husband died, she became a more resolute person and raised her three kids on her own. Unlike in the movie, her marriage was not interrupted by an urgent issue with the launch, but Katherine was very dedicated to her job, spending late nights and long hours at the office. There is a scene in the book when the Space Task Group is working on sending John Glenn to space and Katherine is doing math against the machine computers. And in 1953, the space race was the catalyst for her career in theoretical math.
Katherine Gobble (Johnson after she remarried) came to NACA in 1937, as a computer was immediately assigned to work computing data for test flights.
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