BEYOND JUPITER, The Story of Planetary Astronomer Heidi Hammel
By Fred Bortz
Franklin Watts/Joseph Henry Press, 2005
Encouraging girls to explore the natural world through science is something I get excited about. I was a girl once, after all, and I was a working scientist, too. And I now spend a good deal of my life writing about science and scientists with the hope of encouraging girls … and boys and women and men … to get interested in exploring our natural world. When I heard about the new Women’s Adventures in Science series from Franklin Watts, Joseph Henry Press and the National Academy of Sciences, I simply had to check it out.
Biographies about scientists and their work are fairly common, and these days biographies of women scientists are readily available. (The series I have written for, Houghton Mifflin’s Scientists in the Field includes many titles that feature women scientists.) What distinguished BEYOND JUPITER for me, however, was the way it delved into Heidi Hammel’s professional AND personal lives. As a reader, I learned about Heidi’s career and the path she has taken to it. And I learned a lot about astronomy; heck, I even found myself getting into astronomy as the author recounted the exciting days of the Great Comet Crash (the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashed into Jupiter in 1994 and Heidi led the team of scientists who observed the melee with the Hubble Space Telescope). But Heidi Hammel also allowed readers a look at the realities of her life: a father struggling with alcoholism, the challenge of failing college classes, the yearning for a life outside of her work, the difficulty of balancing a career in science with motherhood. These realities are often overlooked in this sort of biography. I think including them will do a tremendous service to girls and young women.
There are nine other titles in the Women’s Adventures in Science series. There is also this website to learn more about women and girls and science.
Finally, for the writers among us, The National Science Foundation and The Feminist Press are calling for book proposals with similar goals: interesting girls and women in science. If you write about science, you may want to check out this link.