Book Description
for Grasping Mysteries by Jeannine Atkins
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
Atkins profiles seven women whose groundbreaking work drew on their love of and aptitude for math: Caroline Herschel (1750-1848; discovered comets, mapped stars); Florence Nightingale (1820-1910; used math to create charts showing how sanitary practices impacted outcomes for patients during Crimean war, changing medicine); Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923; math major at Girton, one of first British colleges for women; electrical engineer and inventor); Marie Tharp (1920-2006; mapped the ocean floor); Katherine Johnson (1918-2020; NASA "computer"/mathematician who did critical work on Apollo and other programs); Edna Lee Paisano (1948-2014; statistician with U.S. census bureau who used her understanding of Native peoples as a member of the Nez Perce nation to change bureau practices in order to encourage Native people's participation in the census); and Vera Rubin (1928-2016; astronomer who discovered evidence for existence of dark matter in the universe). The individual poems are wonderfully crafted; collectively they give sense of each women's life and work while also making thematic connections to one another, and other groundbreaking women. Johnson is African American, Paisano Nez Perce, the others are white (Rubin Jewish). A fine companion to her previous volume Finding Wonders, about women in science, this inspired work concludes with notes and a brief description of her research into each woman. (Age 10 and older)
CCBC Choices 2021. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2021. Used with permission.