New books

The Wall St. Journal has a list of several new biographies.

I thought that a couple of those would be of interest here. I hope I am not offending anyone..

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Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

By Margot Lee Shetterly (Sept. 6)

Some of NASA’s greatest mathematicians were black women, segregated from their white counterparts and known as “colored computers” during the Jim Crow era. Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures” begins with the World War II labor shortage that ushered black women into the industry and continues through the Civil Rights era and the Space Race. The author traces how Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Christine Darden and Dorothy Vaughan contributed to some of America’s biggest successes in space. A film adaptation, starring Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer, is due out this winter.

American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant

By Ronald C. White Jr. (Oct. 4)

During Reconstruction, as many Northerners stepped back from support for African-Americans in the South, President Ulysses S. Grant ignored his own cabinet’s advice and took aim at the Ku Klux Klan’s violent intimidation of black voters. He pushed through legislation empowering the president to use the military to enforce the 14th amendment and appointed the nation’s first solicitor general to conduct government lawsuits. In 1871 alone, federal grand juries brought 3,000 indictments.

Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File

By John Edgar Wideman (Nov. 15)

In 1945, a decade before 14-year-old Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi for allegedly propositioning a white woman, his father, Private Louis Till, was hanged by the U.S. military for rape and murder while serving in Italy. The victims in the father’s case could not identify their assailants, and no murder weapon was found, but witnesses testified that by the light of a match they could see that the attackers’ faces were black.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/bruce-springsteen-queen-victoria-and-other-life-stories-to-read-this-fall-1472659204