This book presents short biographies of women astronomers from ancient times through to the modern era. Aimed at young adults (fifth grade through junior high, perhaps), this book presents the advancements of women in the astronomical sciences. It is well details with a lot of interesting sidebars and data, and is well suited to its aim of inspiring other young women to see what they can achieve in the field.

My one complaint is that the book seems to be very western centric with fe references to women astronomers outside of the United States and Europe. That may be because women astronomers outside the west are few and not as well known, but I would have liked to have seen more multicultural faces. ( )

Reviewed by Me for TeensReadToo.com

In this comprehensive study of the life and contributions of women astronomers throughout the ages, author Mabel Armstrong shows that she has truly done her research. Filled with great photographs, interesting sidebars, and fun timelines, WOMEN ASTRONOMERS: REACHING FOR THE STARS gives information on twenty-one influential female astronomers.

Included are:

EnHeduanna: Chief Astronomer of the Moon Goddess of the City
Hypatia of Alexandria: Astronomer, Engineer, Physicist, Inventor
Hildegard of Bingen: Heard the music of the spheres
Caroline Herschel: She and her brother revolutionized the study of astronomy
Marla Mitchell: The most famous American astronomer of her time
Williamina Stevens Fleming: Founding mother of the Harvard women astronomers
Annie Jump Cannon: Built a star catalog of more than 350,000 stars
Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Discovered a way to measure distances between stars
Antonia Caetana Maury: Developed a new system for classifying stars
Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin: Called the most brilliant astronomer of her generation
Helen Sawyer Hogg: Canada's favorite astronomer for fifty years
Margaret Burbidge: Described the way chemical elements form in stars
Nancy Roman: Pioneered radio astronomy and orbiting observatories
Beatrice Tinsley: A brilliant career cut tragically short
Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Discovered quasars
Margaret Geller: Found structure in the Universe
Carolyn Shoemaker: Looks for comets that threaten Earth
Sally Ride: Astrophysicist and first U.S. woman in space
Jill Tartar: Searches for extra-terrestrial life
Wendy Freedman: Builds big telescopes and settles Hubble Constant

Spanning in time from around 2350 BCE to the present, this is a book that's perfect for anyone interested in astronomy, but especially young girls. They'll be sure to find plenty of wonderful information and inspiration within the pages of this book, which can only be a good thing. ( )

This is an excellent book whose intended audience is young women, I'd say rough ages 12 through 20. However, it is still an engaging and interesting read for men and women alike, regardless of their age.

If you enjoy reading about history, this gives some brief glimpses of what astronomy was in ancient or medieval times, but most of the focus of the book is in the last 300 years.

It was simultaneously surprising (and not surprising) that save two, I never heard of the women astronomers chronicled in this book. Hildegard I knew from her interests in linguistics, and I of course knew of the astronaut Sally Ride...although I hadn't been really aware of her being a scientist, as that was overshadowed by her astronaut status. As a result, I learned about 22 people who made significant contributions to the science of astronomy.

I feel the book does an excellent job of presenting the (often herculean!) challenges in their pursuit of a career in astronomy. The book presents these challenges in a clear manner, without being aggressive or whiny, a trap that some authors fail to avoid. It was a pretty clear reminder to me how difficult it has been (still is?) for women to have careers in science. One anecdote that sticks in my mind is Vera Rubin's application to Swarthmore College being rejected: "The Swarthmore admissions officer suggested she find a more ladylike career than astronomy."

The book includes some excellent sidebars on astronomy, presenting some introduction to the science and some of the wide range of topics that astronomy covers. Some was new to me, despite having one semester of astronomy in college.

I have only one complaint about the book. When arranging the sidebars, the arrangement is somewhat haphazard, and the "flow" of reading is interrupted inappropriately. I learned to ignore the sidebars (some of whom you can't quite call a sidebar since they take an entire page) and come back to them, otherwise my flow of understanding of the text I was reading was lost. The sidebars themselves were great, but their arrangement needed to have been better.

A good read. If you have an interest in astronomy, history, or women's history in particular, I recommend the book. It'd be an excellent jumping off point to study further in any number of directions.

arrangement flaws. ( )

Books about astronomers abound, but few deal exclusively with women stargazers. The short biographies in this volume introduce young readers to women (from ancient Greece to modern times) whose interest in the skies overcame cultural and educational obstacles to record observations, compile star catalogs, and make discoveries.

The writing was sometimes a distraction (e.g. It's somewhat jarring to read a present tense account of a woman living two centuries ago) but the collection of previously unfamiliar names was refreshing.

Find more of my reviews at Mostly NF.

A note about these newly posted non-link reviews.

This is the second of the "Early Reviewers" books that I've gotten from LibraryThing, and had not realized (when requesting it) that it was a "young adult" book, primarily targeted for teenage girls who might enjoy a career in Astronomy. Needless to say, this meant that I was not bringing the ideal set of eyes to review Mabel Armstrong's Women Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars, despite the numerous science books in my library!

However, I happen to be the father of a couple of bright young daughters, aged 8 and 12, the elder of which I figured was pretty close to being the intended audience for this; so I foisted the book on her once I'd read it, and encouraged her to do a review! I was very proud of the result, and, despite her protestations on length, she ended up writing a very substantial review (much longer than what passes for most "reviews" over on LibraryThing!).

The book is a series of biographical portraits of a couple of dozen women, from ancient figures to the likes of Sally Ride (plus a section of another dozen or so "rising stars"), with various side-bars and essays fleshing out some of the story points for each. The book is generously illustrated (hardly a page lacks at least a relevant bit of clip art), and has a lot of vintage photos (and line art) which open a historical window to the various eras discussed.

So, without further ado, here is what one very intelligent 12-year-old girl thought of the book:

          Woman Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars

          Well, to start off I'd like to make it clear that I have never written a book review before so forgive me if it is not as good as my dad's super long ones. Here's my impression on this very informative book.

          Before this I had always thought that women were kept out of scientific fields almost completely, with maybe one or two exceptions, until the mid to late 1800s (not to mention ancient times!). This book has shown me that women have been able to get to the top in the scientific community even in B.C.E.

          As you would expect, in the earlier times the women who had any scientific influence were married to wealthy men or were from a high position family, but none the less they made a difference. That didn't impress me all that much, it would be expected that the higher powered families would have better chances, but what did surprise me was the fact that from about the 1600s on women achieved high positions on their own and it was because of their intelligence and determination that they gained high status and made such great discoveries.

          I found this book very informative, because I had always heard the idea that women didn't gain much of a scientific status until the 1900s but this has disproved all of those ideas. This book also inspired me because I am interested in pursuing a career that involves science and it has encouraged me to keep going towards that because if women back then could reach the top, then so can I.

          This is a very inspirational and informative book and I would recommend any girl who wants to pursue a scientific career to read this book.

Of course, you're not getting away without my two cents worth ... but most of my notes on this are on minutia. Many of the folks commenting on this on the LibraryThing.com boards were implying that Ms. Armstrong was playing "fast and loose" with the early historical bits, and there is a sense in the section on Hypatia that suggests that the author would have you believe that she'd invented the astrolabe, despite Ptolemy (living a couple of centuries earlier) had written descriptions of this device, as noted in the commentaries composed by Hypatia's father Theon. I also found it very irritating that they chose to illustrate both the Mayan and Aztec cultures with an image of the famed "calendar stone" from the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan ... something that they might have been able to slide by with (in the sense of it being a Mesoamerican artifact, even if having nothing to do with the Maya) if the two illustrations weren't on the same page! That bespeaks either sloppiness or laziness, and one of those is also no doubt the cause of repeating the Glossary entry for "Binary Star" both before and after the entry for "Black Hole". There is also an on-again-off-again timeline that runs across the bottom of about 3/4 of the pages ... while it's interesting early on, it's a distraction, and gets very crowded towards the end, and I think this would have ended up being far more effective done over 3-4 pages in its own section.

Anyway, as my daughter says, this book should be recommended to anybody in the target audience! For an intensely-illustrated larger-than-average format book, this is very reasonably priced, and Amazon has it at a discount that puts it under what a copy from the new/used vendors would run you with shipping. Being that this is a brand-new release, you should be able to find it at your local brick-and-mortar book store, should you be interested in picking up a copy!


A link to my "real" review:

BTRIPP's review of Mabel Armstrong's "Women Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars" - 892 words