100 books like The Stargazer's Sister

As a physicist and a woman of color, Hidden Figures was absolutely unforgettable for me because it was the first book I read that celebrated women scientists of color.

This wonderful account of the remarkable African-American women who broke through societal and racial barriers and played critical roles at NASA during the space race, transformed the way I thought about the history of science. Interlacing history with personal narratives, Shetterly powerfully brings these women to life.

Not only does the book draw these long-forgotten women out of the shadows, but it also shines a light on the biases and challenges they faced which still persist today. This is a must-read for anyone interested in science, history, and achievement in the face of adversity.

This is one of my favourite novels about the imagined life of the 19th Century fossil enthusiast, Mary Anning.

Though poor and uneducated, Mary had a passion for dinosaur fossils, scouring the windswept Jurassic coast near Lyme Regis. She found fossils nobody else could, making discoveries that shook the scientific world. But science in the past was an almost entirely male-dominated arena, and Mary’s finds were effectively stolen from her, and she was ignored and forgotten in the scientific community.

Mary’s story is one of female hardship, endurance, and tenacity, and her contribution to our scientific knowledge deserves to be remembered. 

Although this book centers a fictional scientist rather than a real one, the emotions and passion that the protagonist, Katherine, experiences feel all too real.

As a lifelong fan of mathematics, I’ve often felt that math is one of the most maligned branches of science, so I adored the way that Chung portrays Katherine’s love for the subject and the beauty of a good equation. (You can really tell that she herself has experience in the field!)

I also loved the way that Chung delved into the difficulties Katherine experiences as a woman of color in science in the decades after WWII, from outright racism and misogyny to the kind of constant, low-grade doubt and lack of support that can make being a minority in STEM so difficult. 

Marie Benedict has written several novels now about overshadowed women in history, and this one might be my favorite.

Rosalind Franklin was the talented chemist whose experiments in X-ray crystallographic imaging were crucial to uncovering the double helix structure of DNA – a discovery, of course, long attributed exclusively to her former colleagues Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins.

Benedict does a fabulous job of portraying the difficulties Rosalind faces as a female scientist in this era, constantly disrespected by many of her male colleagues and denied formal recognition by the scientific establishment.

I was fascinated (if at times infuriated on Rosalind’s behalf!) by this book, and also enjoyed the insight into Rosalind’s life as a Jewish woman in Europe in the shadow of WWII. 

Denizens of the twenty-first century need to hop on board a time machine if they want to really see and comprehend the structure and workings of the world through nineteenth-century eyes. Making Stars Physical is just the ticket!  It pulls the modern reader back into an era when the science of astronomy was still mainly focused on tracking the movement of Earth's solar system companions against the array of carefully plotted background stars. It also reveals that, despite a public façade of stability and uniformity of purpose, astronomy's disciplinary boundaries were beginning to blur.

Author Stephen Case presents an engaging examination of the prehistory of astrophysics and the pivotal role played in it by polymath John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871), whose views reflected the complexity, strengths, and limitations of the state of contemporary astronomical knowledge. Although, like many of his contemporaries, he doubted that the chemists' trusted spectroscope would be… show more.

My astronomer kid self adored this book. My adult self was astonished by this accomplished work of nonfiction. Dual narratives take the stage on each page. First, the star that is trying so hard to be born, and second, the girl Cecilia Payne who tries so hard to understand the natural world. As the star goes through various phases, so does Cecilia, who longs to make scientific discoveries. Brilliantly told, the stories of the star and Cecilia parallel each other. I found myself going back and forth between them, marveling at inset pencil and walnut ink illustrations that never overpowered the text.

As a girl, I, too, loved natural science and wished this book had been published in my day. I might have been prepared to carve my way into a man’s world, as Cecilia did. Back matter fills in how stars are born—Cecilia’s discovery—plus a timeline of her amazing… show more.

This is my favorite hard sci-fi classic. I love the beautiful mix of real science (wormholes excepted), compelling story, and characters, and it touches on both first contact and the way in which human nature might cause us to react to it. That is the power combo, in my opinion!

The movie of the book was very good — Robert Zemeckis is a brilliant director — although it left out some fantastic details that, as a math and science fan, I really loved! (I won’t spoil it here; it’s too good.)

If you’ve ever wondered how the universe could have originated from a speck and expanded in a big bang, or why scientists came to believe such a thing, this book explains it all in an accessible, gripping story. Overbye, who is a science writer for the New York Times, paints a sweeping history of big bang cosmology through the colorful characters who put it together in the second half of the 20th century. The story revolves around astronomer Allan Sandage, who was a student of the famed Edwin Hubble. After Hubble discovered that the stars were arranged in galaxies that were speeding away from each other, he died, leaving Sandage to finish his quest to understand the implications of this expansion, measure the age of the universe, and determine whether the cosmos is eternally spreading out into an ever more sparse and lonely place.  

The engagingly told story of a modern hero who not only illuminated some of the darkest secrets of the universe, but who had to do it while fighting sexism all along the way. This is not a romanticized picture of a great scientist, but an inspiring and enraging telling of a real person living a recognizable life whose genius contributed to humanity and her unwavering moral compass and determination did the same for the culture.

Making sense of the varied claims of UFOs and aliens isn’t easy, it gets much harder if you dig into history and discover reports that don’t match the things reported today. This book brings clarity.

The biography of J Allen Hynek, arguably the most significant and influential ufologist who ever lived traces his journey from becoming involved in the field as a government-appointed sceptic brought into to explain away eye-witness accounts through his personal realisation that he was dealing with some phenomena he couldn’t dismiss or understand, to his later life as a tireless investigator into the truly strange and a campaigner for more serious investigation.

A unique life, and a great read partly because Hynek emerges as very human and likable.