The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush | 2023 | Scribner | Hardcover $ 32.50
When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots — a group then made up exclusively of men — had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978 — Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.
Disclosure statement: I received a physical ARC of this book from the publisher via a giveaway hosted on Goodreads.
I was particularly interested in reading this one because, well, inspiring women-making-history nonfiction is kind of my catnip. These people were, and still are, women breaking big bad barriers in science and tech, and they deserve to be recognized for their accomplishments. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I only even recognized two of their names before reading!
I really appreciated the well-balanced mix of personal and professional life details for each of the women profiled in this book. I’d say it focused mostly on the astronaut-specific stuff, which is really the point of the book, but the author also didn’t leave out the really important personal events that affected each astronaut’s career trajectory — things like having children while working at NASA, or their private motivations for pursuing this wild job.
I do appreciate a well-researched and well-cited work of nonfiction. That said, I also wish the book had included a few more direct contributions from interviews with the women themselves. Not a huge problem overall, though; the narrative still flows nicely and includes plenty of detail, and it’s all based on primary sources or high-impact secondary ones.
I will also admit that it was a little difficult for me to keep track of what specifically each featured person was doing at any given time. I think that might just be a consequence of any group biography, though; if I’m reading about more than a couple of people engaged in more or less the same activities over more or less the same time period, sometimes the details of their lives are going to go a little bit blurry in my brain.
This book is a good choice for people who are interested in space exploration history, or in the history of women in the sciences more generally.
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Publication information: Grush, Loren. The six: The untold story of America’s first women astronauts. New York City, NY: Scribner, 2023. Advanced copy.
Source: Provided by publisher, via Goodreads giveaway.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.