I’m not a huge movie person honestly, but I am a huge Taraji P. Henson person so of course I went and saw Hidden Figures in theatres and freaking loved it. This is not a movie review site, so I won’t go into too much detail except to say that it was magical finding out about the histories of these smart-as-fuck women and it was a very entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. I really recommend seeing the movie and then reading the […]
Run, Read This, And Go Tell That
Wow. Just wow. I saw this movie two weeks ago and was blown away by it. Reading the book just gave me even more details about the African American women who came out as human computers (I had no idea that was where the word computers came from, they computed so were seen as computers) and helped shaped the United States space program. Shetterly has historian disease (yeah I use to suffer from this as well, historians unite!) so the flow was off a few […]
Until the movie comes out, whet your appetite with the book!
I saw a movie trailer for Hidden Figures a few months ago and FREAKED OUT. I believe that African-American representation and history is important to the American story. BUT, when those stories are so often reduced to two experiences—slavery and Civil Rights—we get an incomplete story. We need art that’s more inclusive and less reductive. I very much hope that Hidden Figures as a film can be that art. But in the meantime, I discovered there was a book and devoured it in a few […]
Space and Race
Like most people who watched NBC’s (abysmal) coverage of the Olympics this summer I saw the preview for Hidden Figures starring Taraji P Henson and Octavia Spencer. Just as I was about to exclaim “How interesting” my husband muttered “ugh, Oscar bait” which means I’ll have to bring it home from Redbox a few months after it leaves theaters. Luckily for me, like most movies nowadays, there was a book used as source material. Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures tells the story of the African American women […]