MixedThe Washington PostSobel doesn’t provide much guidance in helping us figure out which of Pickering’s female 'computers' were brilliant thinkers and which merely keen-eyed and persistent. For most of the book, we can’t tell whether Sobel’s point is that the women were being abused or provided a nurturing space in which they could prove their intellectual prowess ... As a defense of Pickering, The Glass Universe is fairly convincing. But that purpose seems too narrow to justify the book as a whole. Like the women who contented themselves with classifying the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars, Sobel seems more concerned with conveying raw data than theorizing about her findings. Even by the book’s end, we don’t feel as if we know these women as individuals ... At times, the author describes her heroines’ tedious work in such opaque detail that the reader feels as if she, too, deserves to be paid for her efforts ... Still, if you persist, you will be rewarded with wonderfully intimate moments.
