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Rupi Kaur is a Indian-Canadian poet,writer,illustrator,and performer.She is a #1 New York Times Bestselling Authors with only 2 poetry books that she illustrated and wrote herself.

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Jesse Andrews was born on September 15 in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania.He is a book author and a screenwriter.He wrote the award-winning novel "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" and also adapted it on screen.

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this is the frontpage of jesse andrews dot com

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Margot Lee Shetterly is a writer,researcher,and entrepreneur.She lived in New York,Mexico,and Virginia,where she started her career.She is the founder of the Human Computer Project which is a endeavor that is recovering the names of colored women who worked as mathematicians,engineers,and scientist at NASA or NACA.

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Margot Lee Shetterly: Research. Write. Repeat.

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Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow/HarperCollins). I'm also the founder of The Human Computer Project, an endeavor that is recovering the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930s through the 1980s.

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John Boyne is an Irish author who was born in Dublin, Ireland on April 30,1971.He has published 15 books in 50 languages.His book,"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," has been a New York Times Best Seller,selling about 9 million copies.

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I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

I've published 13 novels for adults, 6 novels for younger readers, and a short story collection, including The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas which was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was adapted for a feature film, a play, a ballet and an opera, selling around 11 million copies worldwide.

Among my most popular books are The Heart's Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky and My Brother's Name is Jessica.

In 2012, I was awarded the Hennessy Literary 'Hall of Fame' Award for my body of work. I've also won 3 Irish Book Awards, and many international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia.

My 13th adult novel, the #1 Bestseller THE ECHO CHAMBER, explores the negative effect of social media on society and was published in August 2021.

My next novel, ALL THE BROKEN PLACES, is a sequel to THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS. Narrated by Bruno's older sister Gretel who, aged 91, looks back at a life scarred by grief and guilt. It will be published on 15th September 2022 in the UK and globally after that.

My novels are published in 58 languages.

Bibliography

Novels:

2000: The Thief of Time

2001: The Congress of Rough Riders

2004: Crippen

2006: Next of Kin

2008: Mutiny on the Bounty

2009: The House of Special Purpose

2011: The Absolutist

2013: This House is Haunted

2014: A History of Loneliness

2017: The Heart's Invisible Furies

2018: A Ladder to the Sky

2020: A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom

2021: The Echo Chamber

2022: All the Broken Places (forthcoming, Sept 2022)

Novels for Younger Readers:

2006: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

2010: Noah Barleywater Runs Away

2012: The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket

2013: Stay Where You Are and Then Leave

2015: The Boy at the Top of the Mountain

2019: My Brother's Name is Jessica

Short Story Collections:

Short Books:

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I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. I've published 13 novels for adults, 6 novels for younger readers, and a short story collection, including The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas which was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was adapted for a feature film, a play, a ballet and an opera, selling around 11 million copies worldwide.

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Katherine Patterson is a Chinese-American author who was born on October 31,1932 (that makes her 85).She is known for her children novels and she has won 2 Newbery Medals and 2 National Book Awards.

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milk and honey is a new york times bestseller. it is rupi kaur's debut collection of poetry and prose. it was first self published in november 2014. the self published edition quickly became a bestseller as it topped north american charts. its grassroots success lead to andrews mcmeel publishing releasing it under their name on october 6 2015.

'milk and honey' is the experience of violence. abuse. love. loss. femininity. the book is divided into four chapters. each chapter serves a different purpose. deals with a different pain. heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

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milk and honey is a new york times bestseller. it is rupi kaur's debut collection of poetry and prose. it was first self published in november 2014. the self published edition quickly became a bestseller as it topped north american charts. its grassroots success lead to andrews mcmeel publishing releasing it under their name on october 6 2015.

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Walking the Manhattan blocks near NYU, the poet Rupi Kaur wears a loose cream-colored suit and an air of easy self-assurance. Her hands rest in her pockets, her kimono-shaped jacket hangs open over a cropped black turtleneck, and she comfortably strides her realm: the realm of college freshwomen who have recently been or may soon go through breakups. She looks like someone prepared to tell you convincingly that "you / are your own / soul mate," to quote one of her poems in its entirety.

Most professional poets cannot expect to be approached by fans. But Milk and Honey, the 25-year-old Punjabi-Canadian's first collection of poetry, is the best-selling adult book in the U.S. so far this year. According to BookScan totals taken near the end of September, the nearly 700,000 copies Kaur has sold put her ahead of runners-up like John Grisham, J.D. Vance, and Margaret Atwood by a margin of more than 100,000. (In 2016, Milk and Honey beat out the next-best-selling work of poetry - The Odyssey - by a factor of ten.) And because Kaur's robust social-media following (1.6 million followers on Instagram, 154,000 on Twitter) has been the engine of her success, she is accustomed to direct contact with her public. So, when a young woman stops her on the way out of Think Coffee - "I love your work!" - Kaur greets her with a hug, poses for a selfie, then turns and calls back to her publicist. "She preordered the second book!"

On the gray late-summer day when we speak in New York, the October 3 rollout of Kaur's second collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, is well underway. Entertainment Weekly has published an exclusive look at the book's cover. Kaur has shared photos of its design (white background, black text, geometric sunflowers) painted across her nude back. And, she reports, the physical copies themselves will go to press the following day. She had scarcely finished finalizing details - "I'm so particular about the spacing and the page and the color" - when her publisher called to tell her that 18 truckloads of paper were on the road. "It really just takes a giant community," she says. "Some random dude or woman driving this truck is helping millions of people have the book in their hands."

Kaur's father, as it happens, was a truck driver: The family came to Canada from India when she was 4, and moved around in pursuit of his work before settling in Toronto's Brampton neighborhood for her adolescence. In classic immigrant-parent fashion, they encouraged her to study science. But she resisted, and although parental disapproval precluded her original goal of fashion school, when the time came for university, she applied to business programs. "Publishing a book was never really the intention," she says. Still, she'd been putting her writing on blogs for years, and kept a Tumblr before switching over primarily to Instagram. She released Milk and Honey through Amazon's CreateSpace platform in 2014, and it was rereleased the following year by the publisher Andrews McMeel. Best known for collections of comic strips like "Calvin and Hobbes," Andrews McMeel has lately become home to a number of poets who first established themselves online, like Kaur and Lang Leav. Leav's collection Love and Misadventure was a self-published hit before AMP picked it up in 2013; they've since released four more of her books. Khloe Kardashian once posted a Lang Leav poem on her estranged husband Lamar Odom's birthday.

Today, a publicist and a VP from Andrews McMeel accompany Kaur. This is a limited entourage. Recently, on her international tour, she often traveled with a manager, a photographer, and a videographer as well as a publicist. "It's a lot of people, and so it's been a lot about setting boundaries," she tells me later. Self-care is a theme of Kaur's work, though it is typically addressed in the context of personal relationships rather than managing a multimedia retinue.

Kaur's ascent to social-media celebrity took place in early 2015. Milk and Honey was just beginning to gain traction with audiences through her Instagram when Kaur (still an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo) posted a photograph she'd taken for a class project. It showed her from behind, lying on her side, with blood leaking through the crotch of her sweatpants. Instagram took down the photo. Kaur responded to their censorship with righteous fury in posts on Facebook and Tumblr. "Their patriarchy is leaking. Their misogyny is leaking," she wrote.
"[M]y womb is home to the divine. a source of life for our species." Instagram backtracked, saying that the photo had been "accidentally removed," but Kaur had already become a free-bleeding cause célèbre, an icon for the sect of internet feminism that held body-positivity and emotional empowerment as central tenets. The incident emphasized a political cast to her writing, which strives for a similar degree of intimacy and raw self-exposure. It created a sense of feminist defiance that -notwithstanding lines like "sex takes the consent of two" and "removing all the hair / off your body is okay / if that's what you want to do" - might not otherwise have been predominant.

Milk and Honey doestouch on themes like the immigrant experience and overcoming sexual trauma, but its overall shape - divided into sections called "the hurting," "the loving," "the breaking," and "the healing" - is something like a breakup record. The book offersreaders an equivalent array of instantly familiar moods: anger, desire, pain, self-pity, self-reflection, and cathartic bursts of affirmation. Much of it is written in the second-person voice of a pop song - to a You whose identity either goes without saying ("the very thought of you / has my legs spread apart"), or else expands to encompass Me ("if he wants to / be with you / he will / it's that simple"). With The Sun and Her Flowers, Kaur ventures into a wider range of subjects, contemplating her parents' lives and the passage of time. Its sections are called "wilting," "falling," "rooting," "rising," and "blooming."

On Amazon and Goodreads, reviewers tend to greet Kaur's work with either total embrace (" definitely something every woman should read") or else a kind of baffled skepticism. "I know I'm going against popular opinion here on this one, but I just ... didn't love it," writes one. "If you want my honest opinion, it felt like I was reading angsty teen Tumblr posts for 200 pages." Mainstream professional assessment has been limited. "Her poetry does not need heavy analysis," , in a piece that placed her "at the forefront of a poetry renaissance in both Britain and US." Last summer, the New York Times' Inside the List feature credited her appeal to an "artless vulnerability, like a cross between Charles Bukowski and Cat Power."

Kaur's Instagram feed is immaculately manicured, a checkerboard on which her poems - all lowercase, often alongside her drawings - alternate with photos, mostly professional, mostly of Kaur. Recently, she posted a picture of herself smiling next to Gloria Steinem in the front row at Prabal Gurung's show at New York Fashion Week. She is, deeply and truly, a poet of Instagram: In the manner of that medium, her work is human experience, tidily aestheticized and monetized, rendered inspirational and relatable in perfect balance. Her poems are, for the most part, short enough to fit easily in Instagram's square frame, and her sentiments general enough to be universally recognizable.

She is, deeply and truly, a poet of Instagram: Her work is human experience, tidily aestheticized and monetized, rendered inspirational and relatable in perfect balance.

In the Instagram feeds of Kaur devotees, Milk and Honey appears beside plates of figs, cups of tea, scented candles, Polaroid photos, and the work of Paulo Coelho. It appears against rumpled white bedding and cloudscapes as seen from airplane windows, above lean thighs and beneath wilting floral arrangements. Its matte black cover - the words "milk and honey" and "rupi kaur" in lowercase white serif, plus two line drawings of bees - conveys the message "I am reading a book" with maximum directness and simplicity (plus a feminist gleam). Other fans render Kaur's words in tattoos or watercolors or careful handwriting, and the effect is something not so different from digital needlepoint: an exercise in copying out the day's mores of femininity ( to be soft is to be powerful; if you are not enough for yourself you will never be enough for someone else; however you need, just bloom) while demonstrating skill in its flourishes.

The poems collected in both books frequently conclude in a final italicized line that explains the poem, either identifying its audience (- to fathers with daughters) or articulating its theme (- closure). But the versions that she posts online end "-rupi kaur," which has given rise to the convenient Twitter punch line of turning things into Rupi Kaur poems by putting "- rupi kaur" at the end of them. For example:

When I bring up the cottage industry of parodies, Kaur laughs. "That's what I get a lot," she says. "Like, this isn't real poetry so I'm just going to enter some spaces and that's it. I'm like, oh, God." She does not seem especially perturbed.

And, perhaps, why should she? Earlier in our conversation, Kaur's constellation of gold rings caught my attention as she was speaking; I compliment them, and she thanks me. "This one I got when Milk and Honey reached number one on the New York Times list," she says, indicating an emerald on her left middle finger. "I got this one in Oakland, and then this one I got when I finished writing the manuscript, and then this one was for selling over a million books. And then this one I got after I got all these and was like, oh, I'm just allowed to buy them now for no reason at all."

We've been sitting in Union Square, on a bench near a flock of volatile pigeons; Kaur has ignored them to an impressive degree, but eventually her publicist suggests we go someplace else. It begins to rain, and so we head toward the Strand. The publicist has warned me in advance that this could be a challenging place to speak - "They adore her," so she may be obliged to sign books - but we are able to browse undisturbed.

Kaur does not like to read when she is writing, and says that she hasn't finished a book all year. Now that The Sun and Her Flowers is complete, though, she's looking forward to digging into the many books she's bought and not yet started.

"I will always go into a used bookstore," she says, even when she's working. "I'll collect a lot of covers that inspire me - whether it's the paper inside, whether it's a font, so then later I can be like, okay, how's mine going to look?"

She enjoys reading nonfiction, especially biographies - "so I want to jump into a bunch of those. They inspire me." She has Marina Abramovic's memoir on her desk; she's interested in the way Abramovic practices vulnerability. "And I have still yet to read Steve Jobs, so I'm going to do that, because why not? I watched the movie; it was pretty cool." Her favorite part was when Jobs tells his incredulous daughter that he's going to put 7,000 songs in her pocket. "She looks at him like, you're crazy and you're annoying and I kind of don't like the fact that you're my dad. I was like, wow, the fact that he said that, and look what happened," Kaur says. "Those are the moments that really inspire me - those types of big, big thinkers."

On a cart at the Strand, Milk and Honey sits alongside Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates. Kaur read half of Between the World and Me. "I had to take notes," she says - it was "more academic" than her typical reading. Recently she got Notorious RBG, and she's been enjoying that.

"This guy is the best," she says, noticing an edition of Kafka's complete stories; she's referring to Peter Mendelsund, the book's designer. "The dream is to have him design my next book." His work, she points out, translates well across media - to different sizes, to posters, to digital.

Her experience at Andrews McMeel has been her first time working with an editor. Still, she's familiar with the collaborative dynamic of a workshop from her college classes, and taught her own creative-writing classes for high school and college students while she was in school.

"For me it was like less about teaching writing and more about providing an environment where people were comfortable enough to express themselves freely, which is what I feel like is needed to write poetry," she tells me. I ask her if there were particular poems she remembers teaching in class.

"There were no particular works," she says - but list poetry, she adds, was one of her favorites.

"It's basically just a list of stuff," Kaur explains. "I would ask them to write a list of things that they wish they were born with, and write the first thing that comes to mind. And then folks would write a list of 20 things, from physical things to abstract things, and it was super cool because then you would go around and you'd read them out loud and everybody had different answers. And the best part was they'd walk away, like, oh, I can do this, I'm a poet. I'm like, yeah, you are."

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The Instagram Poet Outselling Homer Ten to One

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Walking the Manhattan blocks near NYU, the poet Rupi Kaur wears a loose cream-colored suit and an air of easy self-assurance. Her hands rest in her pockets, her kimono-shaped jacket hangs open over a cropped black turtleneck, and she comfortably strides her realm: the realm of college freshwomen who have recently been or may soon go through breakups.

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As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these "computers" are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

"These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary," says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women's lives and accomplishments. The book's film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, is now open in theaters.

"We've had astronauts, we've had engineers- John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft," she says. "Those guys have all told their stories." Now it's the women's turn.

Hidden Figures | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center's advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects- Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn't set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly's own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. "They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs," she says. "And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley."

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women's work. "It wasn't until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized," she says. "That way is not necessarily the norm"

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. "My investigation became more like an obsession," she writes in the book. "I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end."

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women's lives. "It was a lot of connecting the dots," she says.

"I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there," she says. "Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957."

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; "in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory," Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

But life at Langley wasn't just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. "That was incredible courage," says Shetterly. "This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes."

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

"History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis," says Shetterly. "We think of capital "H" history as being these huge figures-George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King." Even so, she explains, "you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures."

The book and movie don't mark the end of Shetterly's work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life's work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures-a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life's work to light. "Not just mythology but the actual facts," she says. "Because the facts are truly spectacular."

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The True Story of "Hidden Figures," the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

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A new book and movie document the accomplishments of NASA's black "human computers" whose work was at the heart of the country's greatest battles

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There's a moment halfway into Hidden Figures when head NASA engineer Paul Stafford refuses the request of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) to attend an editorial meeting about John Glenn's upcoming mission to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Stafford's response is dismissive-"There's no protocol for women attending." Johnson replies, "There's no protocol for a man circling Earth either, sir."

The quote underlines this based-on-a-true-story movie. For NASA to get John Glenn into space and home safely, institutions that supported prejudices and biases needed to start tumbling down. All hands (and brains) had to be on deck.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, the film focuses on three real-life African-American female pioneers: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were part of NASA's team of human "computers." This was a group made up of mostly women who calculated by hand the complex equations that allowed space heroes like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, and Glenn to travel safely to space. Through sheer tenacity, force of will, and intellect, they ensured their stamp on American history-even if their story has remained obscured from public view until now.
Editor's note: After we published this story on Dec. 21, 2016 Hidden Figures was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It didn't win those categories, but did take home Best Movie at the BET Awards, Outstanding Motion Picture at the NAACP Image Awards, Best Action or Adventure Film at the Saturn Awards, and other accolades.
"A Large Capacity for Tedium"

Real-life women of "Hidden Figures"

Women working as so-called "human computers" dates back decades before space exploration. In the late 19th century, the Harvard College Observatory employed a group of women who collected, studied, and cataloged thousands of images of stars on glass plates. As chronicled in Dava Sobel's book The Glass Universe, these women were every bit as capable as men despite toiling under less-than-favorable conditions. Williamina Fleming, for instance, classified over 10,000 stars using a scheme she created and was the first to recognize the existence of white dwarfs. While working six-day weeks at a job demanding "a large capacity for tedium," they were still expected to uphold societal norms of being a good wife and mother.

In 1935, the NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a precursor to NASA) hired five women to be their first computer pool at the Langley campus. "The women were meticulous and accurate... and they didn't have to pay them very much," NASA's historian Bill Barry says, explaining the NACA's decision. In June 1941, with war raging in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt looked to ensure the growth of the federal workforce. First he issued Executive Order 8802, which banned "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin" (though it does not include gender). Six months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the throes of war, NACA and Langley began recruiting African-American women with college degrees to work as human computers.

While they did the same work as their white counterparts, African-American computers were paid less and relegated to the segregated west section of the Langley campus, where they had to use separate dining and bathroom facilities. They became known as the "West Computers." Despite having the same education, they had to retake college courses they had already passed and were often never considered for promotions or other jobs within NACA. Hidden Figures depicts this in a scene in which "computer" Mary Jackson is asked if she's want to be an engineer if she were a white man. Jackson responds, "I wouldn't have too. I would already be one."

Katherine Johnson, the movie's protagonist, was something of a child prodigy. Hailing from the small West Virginian town of White Sulphur Springs, she graduated from high school at 14 and the historically black West Virginia State University at 18. In 1938, as a graduate student, she became one of three students-and the only woman- to desegregate West Virginia's state college. In 1953, Johnson was hired by NACA and, five years later, NACA became NASA thanks to the Space Act of 1958.

The movie muddies the timeline a bit, but Johnson's first big NASA assignment was computing the trajectories for Alan Shepard's historic flight in 1961. Johnson and her team's job was to trace out in extreme detail Freedom 7's exact path from liftoff to splashdown. Since it was designed to be a ballistic flight-in that, it was like a bullet from a gun with a capsule going up and coming down in a big parabola-it was relatively simple in least in the context of what was to come. Nonetheless, it was a huge success and NASA immediately set their sights on America's first orbital mission.

"Get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the numbers are good, I'm ready to go."

The film primarily focuses on John Glenn's 1962 trip around the globe and does add dramatic flourishes that are, well, Hollywood. However, most of the events in the movie are historically accurate. Johnson's main job in the lead-up and during the mission was to double-check and reverse engineer the newly-installed IBM 7090s trajectory calculations. As it shows, there were very tense moments during the flight that forced the mission to end earlier than expected. And John Glenn did request that Johnson specifically check and confirm trajectories and entry points that the IBM spat out (albeit, perhaps, not at the exact moment that the movie depicts). As Shetterly wrote in her book and explained in a September NPR interview, Glenn did not completely trust the computer. So, he asked the head engineers to "get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the numbers are good... I'm ready to go."

While Johnson is the main character, Hidden Figures also follows the trajectories of Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson as they work on the Friendship Seven blast-off. Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) was one of NACA's early computer hires during World War II. She became a leader and advocate for the "West Computers." In 1948, she became NACA's first black supervisorand, later, an expert FORTRAN programmer.

Despite these successes and her capability, she was constantly passed over for promotions herself. As Spencer tells Popular Mechanics, Vaughan struggled with the same things all female computers did while at NASA. "The conflict of working outside of the home to provide the best life for your children and, yet, not physically being there. But she knew she was changing the world."

While Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is also considered a "hidden figure," she certainly stood out during her time at NASA. After graduating with dual degrees in math and physical science, she was hired to work at Langley in 1951. After several years as a computer, Jackson took an assignment in assisting senior aeronautical research engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki and he encouraged her to become an engineer herself. To do that, however, she needed to take after-work graduate courses held at segregated Hampton High School. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to be able to learn next to her white peers. She won, completed the courses, and was promoted to engineer in 1958, making her NASA's first African-American female engineer-and, perhaps, the only one for much of her career.

"She knew she was changing the world."

John Glenn

While these three women's stories remain front and center, John Glenn's recent death makes this film particularly timely. Featured prominently, Glenn is depicted as a goal-oriented, joke-making, tension-cutting, folksy, equal opportunist. According to Barry, that's pretty much exactly how he was.

"Everybody thinks of John Glenn as this iconic war hero... and astronaut, but what's missed a lot is his humanity," says Berry, "Glenn was in a, classic sense, a gentleman. He was always concerned about the people around him and it didn't matter what package they were in. He was a real people person."

Barry also notes that there's an "easter egg" in the film that most people who aren't deep into NASA history will not catch. There's a short scene where Glenn is talking to reporters, and beside him there's a woman- Cece Bibby -painting the Friendship Seven logo onto the spacecraft. The true story is that NASA officials originally did not allow Bibby access to the launch pad, but Glenn intervened and insisted that his artist be allowed to do her job.

Another Day's Work

There's no way a two-hour movie could tell the full story of these women; Shetterly's book paints a much fuller picture. But Hidden Figures highlights NASA's (relatively) progressive attitude for the time, driven in large part by necessity. This happens literally in the film, when the head of the Space Task Group, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) destroys the "colored ladies room" bathroom sign. As Shetterly says to Popular Mechanics, the movie also focuses on Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughn's "transcendent sense of humanity" that allowed them to endure.

Johnson would go on to work on the Apollo program, too, including performing trajectory calculations that assisted the 1969 moon landing. She would retire from NASA in 1986. In 2015, President Obama gave Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Last May, a NASA computational research facility in her hometown of Hampton, Virginia was named in Johnson's honor. And yet, despite the accolades and getting the Hollywood treatment, she told the audience in May that she was just doing her job and "it was just another day's work."

Sometimes changing the world is just that.

Matt is a history, science, and travel writer who is always searching for the mysterious and hidden.

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The True Story of 'Hidden Figures' and the Women Who Crunched the Numbers for NASA

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There's a moment halfway into Hidden Figures when head NASA engineer Paul Stafford refuses the request of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) to attend an editorial meeting about John Glenn's upcoming mission to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Stafford's response is dismissive-"There's no protocol for women attending."

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Resources about The Boy with Striped Pajamas

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Resources about The Boy with Striped Pajamas

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Read 35.8k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. If you start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy named ...

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Winner: Irish Book Award Children's Book of the Year, Irish Book Award People's Choice Book of the Year, Bisto Book of the Year, Que Leer Award Best International Novel of the Year (Spain), Orange Prize Readers Group Book of the Year Shortlisted for British Book Award, the Border's New Voices Award; the Ottaker's Children's Book Prize, the Paolo Ungari Literary Award (Italy) , Irish Book Award Irish Novel of the Year Award; the Leeds Book Award; the North-East Book Award; the Berkshire Book Award; the Sheffield Book Award; the Lancashire Book Award; Prix Farniente (Belgium); Flemish Young Readers Award; Independent Booksellers Book of the Year; Deutschen Jugend Literatur Preis (Germany) Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the International IMPAC Literary Award
Nine year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution or the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country.
All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas.
Bruno's friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process.

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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne

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Winner: Irish Book Award Children's Book of the Year, Irish Book Award People's Choice Book of the Year, Bisto Book of the Year, Que Leer Award Best International Novel of the Year (Spain), Orange Prize Readers Group Book of the Year Shortlisted for British Book Award, the Border's New Voices

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1977 ALA Notable Children's Books
1977 School Library Journal Best Book of the year
1978 Newbery Medal
1978 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
1981 Janusz Korczak Medal (Poland)
1981 Silver Pencil Award (Netherlands)
1986 Le Grand Prix des Jeunes Lecturs (France)
1986 Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award

Jess Aarons had to be the Fastest runner at Lark Creek Elementary School, the best, but when he was challenged by Leslie Burke, a girl, that was just the beginning of a new season in Jess's life. Leslie and her parents were new comers to the rural community where Jess Lived, and were thought to be a bit odd, for they didn't even own a TV, though their house was filled with books. Some-what to Jess's surprise, he and Leslie became friends, and the worlds of imagination and learning that she opened to him changed him for ever. It was Leslie's idea to create Terabithia, their secret Kingdom in the woods where they reigned supreme. There is no enemy - not their teacher Monster Mouth Meyers, their schoolmates Gary Fulcher and Janice Avery, Jess's four sisters, or even Jess's own fears and Leslie's imaginary foes - could defeat them. The Legacy that Leslie finally brought to Jess enabled him to cope with the unexpected tragedy that touched them all.

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins
ISBN 9780064401845

Adaptations

In 2007, Bridge to Terabithia was adapted into a major motion picture from Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Gábor Csupó, written by David L. Paterson and Jeff Stockwell, and stars Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Robert Patrick, Bailee Madison, and Zooey Deschanel.

Watch it on Amazon and iTunes.

Watch the Trailer:

Praise

"Set in contemporary rural America, the story is one of remarkable richness and depth, beautifully written."
THE HORN BOOK

"Eloquent and assured."
KIRKUS REVIEWS

"15 Banned Books Every Tween and Teen Should Read."
BRIGHTLY

Extras
Free Teaching Guide (PDF)

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Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson

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1977 ALA Notable Children's Books1977 School Library Journal Best Book of the year1978 Newbery Medal1978 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award1981 Janusz Korczak Medal (Poland)1981 Silver Pencil Award (Netherlands)1986 Le Grand Prix des Jeunes Lecturs (France)1986 Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award Jess Aarons had to be the Fastest runner at Lark Creek Elementary School, the best, but when he was challenged by Leslie Burke, a girl, that was just the beginning of a new season in Jess's life.

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Bridge to Terabithia has 357,692 ratings and 9,452 reviews. Elaine said: When I read this in fourth grade, I loved it because it was enchanting, and remi...

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Resources about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

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Resources about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has 99,449 ratings and 11,889 reviews. Emily May said: "If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murd...

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Me and Earl and The Dying Girl is written from the perspective of Greg Gaines an awkward high school senior who is not part of any social group with no 'friends' but a 'co-worker' Earl, who he makes film parodies with. This book is where Greg documents what happened to him during his senior year when his mother forces him to socialise with his sort-of ex-girlfriend Rachel, who has just been diagnosed with leukaemia. Greg and Rachel form a friendship as Greg tries desperately not to get attached to 'the dying girl'.

This was probably the funniest book I've ever read. Greg's self deprecating narrative was extremely cynical and utterly hilarious and along with Earl's epic lines of wisdom, it made for a laugh out loud book. Before reading, I was sceptical about this book as I didn't understand how anyone could make a book involving cancer funny but somehow, Jesse Andrews has done it.

One thing I should make clear is that Me and Earl and the Dying girl is not about cancer, it's about friendship and life and love. It went against every cliché possible and everything that would have been expected from just reading the blurb. There was no soppy professing of undying love or magical journeys; it was just teenagers being teenagers in hard circumstances.

One thing I loved about Me and Earl was the way it completely refused to live up to stereotypes. Whereas most books, especially YA, about similar circumstances would have made it melodramatic and cringe worthy, Andrews seemed to underplay everything. Greg doesn't fall madly in love with Rachel and the film they try to make for Rachel isn't a piece of genius cinematography - and no one pretends that it is. In fact, Greg tries to feel as little as possible for Rachel and doesn't even try to empathize with her situation - or at least he pretends not to feel anything.

As funny as this book is, it is also very, very sad. In some ways, as the protagonist he is ignoring how sad his and Rachel's friendship is, and it makes you, as a reader, feel even worse. As the characters weren't that upset over it (to begin with) I felt like it was my responsibility to feel upset for them and Rachel - who the reader barely gets to know anyway due to an extremely self-involved protagonist. So although I laughed constantly throughout this book at the end I cried floods of tears.

Everyone should read this book. Whether you're a teenager or middle aged, boy or girl I truly believe that everyone will be entertained and moved by Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. I was. It's the kind of book that sticks with you long after you have read it.
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teen romance books for childrens and teens

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews - review

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Me and Earl and The Dying Girl is written from the perspective of Greg Gaines an awkward high school senior who is not part of any social group with no 'friends' but a 'co-worker' Earl, who he makes film parodies with.

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Katherine Paterson should have improved more of her descriptions such as Leslie's imaginary friend´s appearance.She used similes and personification,but they did not describe the character enough see the image of who the character is and how they would have looked like in real life. To improve, she should have been more descriptive on the characters emotions,appearance and personal life.

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Did not respond

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the boy in the striped pajamas-book vlog

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me and earl and the dying girl-book vlog