A review by mephelan
Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe by George Johnson

3.0

Johnson does a decent job of telling the story of how we came to learn the size of the universe. This was fine but ultimately unsatisfying, as Leavitt is barely a major character in her own scientific biography. Johnson notes in the preface that very little is known about her life, which begs the question - why choose her for this series? I've very much enjoyed a number of others in this collection, but why not write about Curie or Lovelace or Franklin or someone else where you can really flesh out the biography aspect?