AMONG THE STARS : THE LIFE OF MARIA MITCHELL
By Margaret Moore Booker
2007 Hardcover

Few avenues of high achievement were open to American women in the mid-nineteenth Century, but a young librarian on Nantucket Island, off the coast of Cape Cod, sent a startling signal through the male-dominated world of science when she emerged as a world-class astronomer. Maria Mitchell, from the roof of the family's home overlooking Main Street, peering into the heavens with a hand-me-down telescope, showed that she could not only discover a comet, but compute its orbit and exchange scientific observations with the world’s leading astronomers. She became an admired figure on the international scene, then a much-beloved professor at Vassar College, and finally a leader in the emerging women’s rights movement.

In her mind, these achievements seemed all part of a logical whole: the education and expansion of women’s minds far beyond the stereotypes of the time, and the projection of this new power into modern society. Not a radical, not an establishment figure, but a unique and innovative force in her time Mitchell is meticulously and expertly portrayed by Margaret
Booker in this first comprehensive biography.