100 books like Hidden Figures

What I loved about this book is that it is the true story of an American woman living in Nazi-occupied France, where she organised and ran resistance groups and led them in action.

The book, though factual, reads like a fictional novel, and her exploits and shear "daring do" almost beggar belief. She only had one leg, a fact that many who met her were completely unaware of, yet she crossed the Pyrenees on foot in winter!

It didn’t surprise me to find out that the men who "ran" the operations from London and Washington denigrated her achievements and consigned her to obscurity, describing her in the words of the book’s title. But she was a truly amazing heroine, and I would have loved to have met her.

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.)

A work of science writing might be a surprising addition to this list of storytellers, artists, and designers, but surely the life of the African American woman, mother, and cancer sufferer whose cell tissue became one of the most widely used biological lab media in contemporary medical research epitomizes creation and creativity.

Lacks’s history is a terrible story of racial anonymity and exploitation, which Skloot tells with extraordinary sensitivity. Always being sure to keep Lacks and her descendants at the forefront, Skloot both details the atrocities that sometimes underlie civilization’s progress and restores Lacks’s long overdue credit for making possible some of the most important medical advances of the twentieth century.

This book achieves the highest level of nuanced, deeply human storytelling. To me, it is one of the finest works of nonfiction ever. 

My friend Denise Kiernan shines a light on the thousands of women who worked on the Manhattan Project.

If you’ve seen Oppenheimer and you’re interested in the story behind the development of the atomic bomb, then this book will help you understand the hidden figures behind its creation. What I love the most about Denise’s writing is the way that she brings the mysterious origins of Oak Ridge, a Tennessee town created to house the people working on the bomb, to life. 

At a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, women were at the center of the story.

In 2018, I went to an author reading by Liza Mundy. Deep into researching my own nonfiction book, I was fascinated as Mundy talked about interviewing women who became code breakers in World War II.

The government recruited them from top colleges and universities, looking for women who were gifted in math and music. The women were sworn to secrecy and kept their word, telling people they had been secretaries during the war. They maintained that fiction into their old age or their graves.

Mundy tracked down survivors and showed them documentation that the program had been declassified. They had been released from their vow of silence and could share their stories with her. The book is excellent.

Janice P. Nimura digs deep into the diaries and letters of the Blackwell sisters, who were among the very first women in America to be trained as doctors. The book reads like a novel without sacrificing historical accuracy and scholarly rigor. I found myself deeply moved by the sisters’ struggles to be taken seriously as physicians in an entirely male world. Jeered in lecture halls and treated as curiosities off-campus, they maintained a dignified courage and a relentless work ethic. Eventually, they shamed their skeptics and opened the doors for future generations of women doctors. This is a compelling tale told well.

It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.

Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.

Kate Moore sucked me into the world of the radium girls, who literally glowed from the radium dust that covered them at work, and that they ultimately ingested, sickening them in horrific ways.

The book made me want to scream in anger at their treatment and cheer for those who were determined to defend them and deliver justice. The story is a huge eye-opener about the importance of industry oversight and occupational health regulations. 

I love this book because it turns the most impactful science discovery of the 21st century–CRISPR gene editing–into a page-turner. Isaacson combines a biography of Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier, with lucid accounts of the science and sequence of research breakthroughs that underlie CRISPR editing, as well as the intrigues and jockeying among powerful scientists and personalities vying for prizes and patents on the technology.

I came through this book to appreciate the enormous potential of CRISPR gene editing for good (curing hereditary diseases) and not-so-good (designer babies or, in the words of Vladimir Putin, “a soldier, an individual who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain”). CRISPR promises to make human selection as important as natural selection in the evolution of many species, including humans.

I enjoyed this book specifically because it illustrates trees as social creatures, talking and sharing with each other and building relationships. Peter Wohlleben really opened my eyes to the hidden underground network in forests.

The way Peter tells the story of trees' lives makes it so relatable. He tells the story of trees' unique lives in such an approachable and familiar way, describing how they "feel" pain, "taste" chemicals, and "hear" sounds.

I found the way Wohlleben animates complex scientific ideas through captivating prose most appealing. Deepening my personal relationship with nature.