"Rise of the Rocket Girls: Uncovering the Trailblazing Women Who Pioneered Space Exploration from Missiles to the Moon to Mars"

Pamela G.: Interesting history. Good read.

United States on Nov 19, 2023

Naomi Goring: It is similar to Hidden Figures, but not especially well-written. The author did a lot of research on these women, but resorts to conventional assumptions to fill in what a woman might have felt.

United States on Aug 06, 2022

Pam Shelton-Anderson: Having worked in STEM all my adult life, I really appreciate stories of the women who were pioneers in these fields, especially in a time frame when they were ignored and very unappreciated. Like the women in "Hidden Figures", these women at JPL set a standard for exemplary work and competence, while enduring the prejudices that said women were not capable in math and engineering, were forced to work for lower pay and had very little resources for child care etc. This story did suffer somewhat from the writing. There were a number of grammatical errors, awkward sentence structures and some issues that better editing might have corrected. The narrative at times meandered and there was often emphasis on what the women were wearing which seems to reinforce a lot of female stereotypes. With some of the writing issues, the book is really a 3 star, but because I enjoyed the book and these stories were very interesting and deserved to be heard, I bumped to a 4.

United States on Jul 21, 2022

Allen King: This is an impressive work focusing on the women that helped the Jet Propulsion Lab become a major facet of the US space program. Unlike some books about the trials and tribulations of women penetrating areas of the work force that were basically exclusive to men, this work is not whiny about the plight of women as they demonstrated their remarkable abilities. It is eye opening how much they contributed. It is factually oriented and not overly editorializing. Really folks, this is a solid contribution to both how the space program grew and how much women contributed to it while facing very real obstacles in the process.

United States on Dec 04, 2021

gcj: I WAS HOPING IT MAY HAVE BEEN A BIT MORE TECHNICAL WITH MORE INFO ON THE PROBLEMS THEY WERE SOLVING AND HOW THEY SOLVED THEM BUT IT WAS VERY LIGHTWEIGHT IN THIS DEPARTMENT. I EVENTUALLY GOT BORED SO i DID NOT FINISH IT.

United Kingdom on Jan 19, 2020

Rc: Cadeau

France on Nov 28, 2019

PamPam: Gracias a los comentarios tan acertados que hay de este libro, llegué a él, la historia me tuvo enganchada todo el tiempo, siempre me pasa que quiero seguir leyendo pero no quería se terminará, de lo mejor que he leído este año, me gustó mucho la forma de escribir de Nathalia Holt, recomendado a todas aquellas mujeres que como yo sienten curiosidad por el papel de mujeres en la ciencia. Inspirador, divertido, real y sincero. Gracias Nathalia Holt por estas historias. 📈🚀👩🏻

Mexico on Dec 10, 2018

C L Bewick: Well written fascinating tale of the women who were JPL's human computers which brought out that they were far more than number-crunchers. What is sobering is that not all of the obstacles they faced in the 1950's & 60's have been removed.
As an aeronautical engineer a few more details - and pictures of hardware would have been appreciated.

United Kingdom on Jul 28, 2017

L. Caulkins: Wow! Fantastic non-fiction read! In telling us the story about the women of the Jet Propulsion Lab, Holt brings us a the bonus of another angle of the rise and development of the space exploration era. This one peers at the history from outside Cape Canaveral/Kennedy, and thus provides a fuller understanding of how widespread the industry has been - there is so much more than "just" NASA.

This book will appeal to a broad spectrum - men and women, older and youthful. While containing trivial memoir-style annecdotes that infuse the more technical discussions with personal interest and keep the book from getting heavy, it's not a Chick Lit piece that would bore someone like my husband (in fact, he's reading it now). (And don't take my words to indicate that he's a chauvinist, because he's no such thing, and he loves strong female characters - just, living in a house of all women and girls, he sometimes feels that certain books or movies have "too much estrogen for me right now". This book definitely will not do that for him.)

The writing is very engaging, so no yawning over Holt's work. Rise leaves me wanting to find recent books about the planets and their moons, and...

United States on Jan 31, 2017

Amazon Customer: Most interesting. These young women, the Computers they were called in the 1940s,were often just out of school and were absolute Maths geniuses.They were head-hunted for the development of bigger Rockets, (jet propulsion) and went on to enable the Space Program.They worked with pencil and (paper) notebooks, (thousands of them) while their fingers got blistered, bloodstained and finally calloused. The men in the Computer group were promoted to Engineer. The women went on computing, wearing neat office-wear and heels, and never reached such heights. Gradually the mechanical computers came into being, improving to a workable level, but it was a long time before they were both fast and accurate enough to trust ahead of a human computer. I enjoyed hearing details of the triumphs and catastrophes before the early satellite launches, as it was all very secret in the 1950s, until the Sputnik was actually circling, in 1958.

Australia on Aug 16, 2016