Editorial Review

Prepare for ramped-up STEM engagement with the latest installment in the STEM Trailblazer Bios series. In four to five brisk, photo-filled chapters, entries showcase each innovator’s early life, education, career, and groundbreaking achievements. Code-Breaker and Mathematician Alan Turing introduces the brilliant creator of the code-cracking Bombe machine. It’s estimated that Turing’s Bombe shaved at at least two years of WWII, saving approximately two million lives. Schwartz also addresses homophobia, the British government’s 1952 condemnation of Turing, and his posthumous pardon decades later. In Environmental Activist Wangari Maathai, readers learn of the convention-shattering leader. Born in Kenya in 1940, Maathai valiantly combated countrywide deforestation through the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots tree-planting imitative. In 2004, Maathai became the first-ever African to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Google Cybersecurity Expert Parisa Tabriz spotlights the self-proclaimed “Security Princess,” tracing her career from college computer-security club meetings to a post as Google’s fiercest white hat. Science Educator and Advocate Bill Nye turns the lens on the beloved “science guy,” an engineer who’s developed suppressor tubes for Boeing, an Emmy award-winning PBS program, and two Mars-based sun dials. With boldface vocabulary words and boxed quotations throughout—as well as appended time lines, source notes, and further resources—these nimble bios are just the thing for mover and shakers in the making.