Nathalia Holt, "Rise of the Rocket Girls"

Before 1935, a “computer” was a person who performed calculations; for the early decades of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the computers who figured velocities, plotted trajectories, and helped develop rocket design were all women. In her history of this specialized team of mathematicians, Holt, author of Cured, contributor to publications including The New York Times, Slate, and Popular Science, and a former fellow at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, puts the space program into a new and more accurate perspective; her interviews with the surviving women let these experts tell their own stories—and burst any lingering myths that women can’t excel in science.

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