Trailblazers: 33 Women in Science Who Changed the World

Swaby adapts her 2015 book for adults, Headstrong, for a younger audience, profiling 33 women who made strides in science, medicine, and technology. The biographies detail the roots of the women’s intellectual curiosity and the circumstances that led to their successes, despite what were often tremendous odds. In the 18th century, Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi created an expansive text that “would provide generations of Italian children with a solid and well-rounded mathematics education,” while doctor Virginia Apgar was an early pioneer of anesthesiology. The descriptions of the women’s lives often have a quiet poetry: astronomer Maria Mitchell worked in a rooftop observatory “amid spiders and bugs and a stray cat, on both frigid nights and warm ones.” Readers with scientific ambitions of their own will find much to admire in these accomplished and unconventional women. Ages 10–up.[em] Agent: Mackenzie Brady Watson, New Leaf Literary & Media. (Sept.) [/em]