Scan barcode
ellzi's review against another edition
2.0
For the most part, this is an interesting account. It does lag a little in parts.
I have to point out a serious epistemological failing though. Throughout the book, men are given either their proper titles or referred to just by their surnames.
Only a few of the women are given their correct academic titles. If there is a reason that a woman with a PhD should be referred to as, for example, Miss Cannon and not Dr Cannon then this should be explained. It was particularly galling when a woman's PhD wasn't seen as reason to change her title but her marriage was and she was duly called Mrs afterwards.
In at least one of these instances, Sobel could have easily worked around this, if she felt these women would have objected to being referred to as Dr, by simply referring to her as her surname, which she does for men even when they have a brother with the same name!
Perhaps this is picky but if a book is taking women as its subject, it should be internally coherent on small points like this.
I have to point out a serious epistemological failing though. Throughout the book, men are given either their proper titles or referred to just by their surnames.
Only a few of the women are given their correct academic titles. If there is a reason that a woman with a PhD should be referred to as, for example, Miss Cannon and not Dr Cannon then this should be explained. It was particularly galling when a woman's PhD wasn't seen as reason to change her title but her marriage was and she was duly called Mrs afterwards.
In at least one of these instances, Sobel could have easily worked around this, if she felt these women would have objected to being referred to as Dr, by simply referring to her as her surname, which she does for men even when they have a brother with the same name!
Perhaps this is picky but if a book is taking women as its subject, it should be internally coherent on small points like this.
velocitygirl14's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Informative, but was a bit slow in places for me. Good stuff though.
balletbookworm's review against another edition
slow-paced
3.0
This is...fine. It's a thorough history of the Harvard Observatory and how the women who worked there as computers and examined the glass plates to measure the stars advanced the science. However, it's presented almost as a utopia where everyone was ever so nice and nothing bad ever happened at the workplace, despite being an underpaid and undervalued workforce because patriarchy and the old academic saw that people will work themselves to exhaustion for the love and passion of "The Science". If those women hadn't been brilliant and <i>WILLING</i> to do that grunt work for little to no money, they would have had no utility to the Observatory. I am a woman who works in academic medicine, and has since the late-90s, so you cannot tell me that there wasn't friction or harassment or worse and that all the men treated all the women with great respect just because the two Observatory directors on record expressed admiration for their work in letters that they knew were likely to be preserved for the public record.
The audiobook is extremely slow (I mean S L O W) and the final 1.5 hours constitutes the backmatter including sources, a timeline, glossary, biographies, etc.
The audiobook is extremely slow (I mean S L O W) and the final 1.5 hours constitutes the backmatter including sources, a timeline, glossary, biographies, etc.
mikmercado's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
My favorite read of 2023
jeffersoneverestcrawford's review against another edition
4.0
By being a history of the Harvard College observatory and the many woman that advanced astronomy in those years it’s also a general history of astronomy between 1850s and the end of WW2, which is an amazingly strange era of developing knowledge and techniques