Having loved the film Hidden Figures enough to have bought the book that tells the story of Katherine Johnson's involvement in the space race, I was thrilled to find this picture book. In 2018, Mattel made a Barbie in her image. In 2017, a research facility in her name was unveiled. Her 35-year-old career earned her a Presidential Medal of Freedom and many more accolades. She is the difinition of a child prodigy. I was unaware that Katherine entered highschool at age ten and graduated from college by age eighteen. In fact, her tragectory calculations were trusted above most. This lady was fundamental in the launching of rockets into space. To say Katherine was important to NACA (and then to NASA) is an understament. Katherine's story is one resilience and courage, of guts and glory. I thought I was not going to learn anything new but I did. This abridged biography for children has wonderful illustrations and a strong delivery. Having read Hidden Figures and seen the movie I gotta say, she is one impressive lady. I am not unfamiliar with Katherine Johnson. When the NACA (National Advisory Committe for Aeronautics) was hiring human "computers", Katherine applied and thus began a remarkable career. After college Katherine wanted to pursue a career in Mathematics but due to her gender and her race, she had to settle for a job as a teacher. She was by far the smartest in her class and also the youngest person in the room (having skipped three grades). She attended high school in New York, university in North Carolina (Go Blue Devils!!!!) and now lives in Toronto with her husband and dog, Ella. She has also won three Silver Birch awards and a Red Cedar award. She has won the Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing for Children twice,once for The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea and once for The Insecto-Files, and the Picture Book of the Year Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association for A Porcupine in a Pine Tree. Greenie's Mad Lab was a finalist at MIP.com Junior in Cannes. She also writes for children’s magazines and for children's television. She gave us a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history.Helaine Becker has written over 70 books, including the #1 National bestseller, A Porcupine in a Pine Tree,and its sequel, Dashing through the Snow, Sloth at the Zoom, Dirk Daring, Secret Agent, the Looney Bay All-Stars chapter book series, non-fiction including Counting on Katherine, Worms for Breakfast and Zoobots (all Junior Library Guild Selections), Monster Science, You Can Read, Lines Bars and Circles, and Boredom Blasters, plus many picture books and young adult novels. “The wonderful gift that Katherine Johnson gave us is that her story shined a light on the stories of so many other people. Johnson was “exceptional in every way,” Shetterly said Monday. “It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work.” “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” on which the movie was based. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to take an American into space.
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