Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve enjoyed a long career as an author-illustrator of picture books for children. I search for stories of girls and women whose greatness has been overlooked: - Caroline Herschel, pioneering astronomer, - Oney Judge, the slave who escaped from George and Martha Washington, - Margaret Knight, the inventor who fought the man who tried to steal her idea and won in court - and Lizzie Murphy, the big-league baseball star. Every one of them had to overcome centuries of fierce resistance to female empowerment. A few of my biographies began as picture books, but their subjects quickly outgrew that format.


I wrote

Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - And Won!

By Emily Arnold McCully,

Book cover of Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - And Won!

What is my book about?

Tarbell’s brave, scrupulous, serial expose of Rockefeller in McClure’s Magazine riveted the nation and led to the breakup of the…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of ADA Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist

Emily Arnold McCully Why did I love this book?

Written by mathematicians with a great literary flair, and beautifully illustrated with archival materials, this most recent Lovelace book is a comprehensive and lively recounting of her genius and its consummation in her collaboration with Charles Babbage.  It should banish any lingering doubts about Lovelace’s ability to interpret Babbage’s invention (even better than he did, at times) and to envision the potential that could only be realized nearly 100 years after her tragically early death. 

If just one book is to be read about Ada (other than my own), this is it!

By Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, Adrian Rice

Why should I read it?

1 author picked ADA Lovelace as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron and his highly educated wife, Anne Isabella, is sometimes called the world's first computer programmer and has become an icon for women in technology. But how did a young woman in the nineteenth century, without access to formal school or university education, acquire the knowledge and expertise to become a pioneer of computer science?

Although an unusual pursuit for women at the time, Ada Lovelace studied science and mathematics from a young age. This book uses previously unpublished archival material to explore her precocious childhood, from her ideas for…


Book cover of Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter

Emily Arnold McCully Why did I love this book?

This was the first biography of Ada. It is opinionated, comprehensive, and entertaining. Ada’s short, tumultuous life is related with little attention to mathematics or proto-computing, but much to her psychology and that of her family and friends. It’s a gothic tale of emotional hypocrisy and cruelty. Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, encouraged the aura of wickedness surrounding Lord Byron and styled herself its victim. Virulently self-righteous, she encouraged her daughter’s mathematical gifts in order to smother her imaginative ones. Despite Victorian piety, superstition, Old Boy network science, drug addiction, the confinement of women - and her overbearing Mother - Ada managed to engage the latest ideas in England and Germany and, working with Babbage, to produce an astonishingly prescient analysis of the “first computer.”

Book cover of Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science

Emily Arnold McCully Why did I love this book?

Toole, the first expert in computing to tackle Ada’s story, gathered her letters from British archives and libraries, then arranged their highlights to tell the story of Lovelace’s life in all of its complexity. Her introductions to each decade of life set the context but Ada herself tells the story in her inimitable voice. This book was published before scholars were willing to credit Ada with her achievement. In fact, many dismissed it altogether. It was Toole’s mission to correct the record and she succeeded admirably. This is the essential Lovelace Reader.

By Betty Alexandra Toole,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, was one of the first to write programs for, and predict the impact of, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843. Beautiful and charming, she was often characterized as "mad and bad" as was her illustrious father. This e-book edition, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science, emphasizes Ada's unique talent of integrating imagination, poetry and science. This edition includes all of Ada's fascinating letters to Charles Babbage, 55 pictures, and footnotes that encourages the reader to follow Ada's pathway to the 21st century.


Book cover of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

Emily Arnold McCully Why did I love this book?

Babbage’s computer, the Analytical Engine, was never built, but in this steampunk graphic novel, he and Ada do, enlisting Queen Victoria (who at last provides the government funding that was denied Babbage), George Eliot, and a host of others in a brilliant imagining based on thorough research and astounding comprehension. Padua even visually renders the massive machine and its operation. I can’t emphasize enough the richness of this book, or commend the herculean effort that must have gone into its making. A gem and another invaluable contribution to the long resurrection of Ada Lovelace.

By Sydney Padua,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the British Book Design and Production Award for Graphic Novels
Winner of the Neumann Prize in the History of Mathematics

In The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious set of adventures

Meet two of Victorian London's greatest geniuses... Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron: mathematician, gambler, and proto-programmer, whose writings contained the first ever appearance of general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. And Charles Babbage, eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, an enormous clockwork calculating machine that would have…


Book cover of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Emily Arnold McCully Why did I love this book?

We are often reminded that we live in the Information Age and this witty, lucid, wide-ranging book tells how that happened and what it means. Ada plays an important role, but it is the stage that matters here. Where did she fit in, how have her ideas helped to create our world? Gleick’s profound erudition equips him to link all the disparate fields that make up Information. Ada, with her appetite for all kinds of ideas, from flight, to rainbows, musical composition, mesmerism, electricity, hydrodynamics, poetry, ethics, and, of course, information, embodies an ongoing transformation of human consciousness.  Gleick introduces her and many others in dramatic set pieces that make this a thrilling book to read.

Finally, anyone seriously interested in Ada Byron Lovelace should consult the online proceedings of the Ada Lovelace Symposium conducted at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford in December 2015.

Over the course of two days, literary, mathematical, cultural, and other experts delivered fascinating papers on various aspects of Ada’s life and work. Original insights abound, and there is even a nod to the controversy that stubbornly hangs around her name.

By James Gleick,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Information as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, the world's leading prize for popular science writing.

We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code.

In 'The Information' James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the 'bit', it is a fascinating…


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Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - And Won!

By Emily Arnold McCully,

Book cover of Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - And Won!

What is my book about?

Tarbell’s brave, scrupulous, serial expose of Rockefeller in McClure’s Magazine riveted the nation and led to the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly. Her work made her the most famous woman in America. The only female Muckraker, Tarbell was born in Western Pennsylvania just as oil was discovered there. During her early years, Oil came to dominate the industry and seep into every other aspect of modern life. Using predatory and illegal tactics, John D Rockefeller came to dominate Oil.

As a single woman in a hyper-masculine age, Tarbell found a way to be one of the boys, and was uniquely respected for her views on issues of the day. She is a complex, flawed, but admirable model for girls and young women drawn to journalism, or the history of ascendancies over a world stubbornly shaped by male entitlement.

Book cover of ADA Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist
Book cover of Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter
Book cover of Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science

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Leslie Tall Manning Author Of Maggie's Dream

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Mentor Laugher Research nut Avid reader

Leslie's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

Winner of the Literary Titan Book Award

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What is this book about?

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But Marilyn's quest is halted when her daddy, an ex-con she has never met, is chosen by the courts as the new guardian. Caleb…


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Interested in Ada Lovelace, women in mathematics, and information theory?

Ada Lovelace 10 books