The book is an expansion of Padnani’sOverlookedseries for theNew York Times, which was created in 2018 in response to reader questions about including more women and people of color in the obituaries section.
“It was for me, a very personal project,” Padnani tells PEOPLE. “As the daughter of Indian immigrants, I was taught to blend in, assimilate, work really hard, keep your head down, not really brag about success. And so you tend to just feel like, after a while, you’re walking around invisible. And I really wanted to see more people like me represented in our section.”
The book features figures like investigative journalist Ida B. Wells and writer Sylvia Plath as well as Cohen.
Black and his mother Judith Love Cohen.
Cohen was born on August 16, 1933 to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents left Russia for the United States before World War I began. She garnered an interest in STEM from her father, Maurice, who taught her geometry. Cohen, who went to Brooklyn College to study engineering, also balanced an interest in the arts with her education, dancing for the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet company.Cohen was one of few female aerospace engineers during her career. She would go on to work on several NASA projects, including the Minuteman missile and the Apollo Abort Guidance System. The latter, which would help astronauts abort before a shuttle ran out of fuel, proved crucial during the 1970Apollo 13mission, which attempted to reach the moon before an oxygen tank exploded. The program helped the crew return to safety.
“She would come home from work with a head full of steam — of ideas and passions,” Black says in the book. His mother was also supportive of him and his acting career. Katz, who married Cohen in the 1980s, says Black and his mother had a “really good relationship.”
Jack Black.
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.“I think it was just so ahead of its time, the books,” Padnani says. “‘You can be a woman engineer, you can be this, you can be that.’ I think that’s a lot of what we’re seeing today. But she did that many, many years ago. And so I think it was just really forward-thinking.”For Katz, Cohen’s legacy continues to reach far and wide.“I don’t know what to say about her because there’s so many facets of her,” he says. “She was a good writer, a good mother, a good wife, and just a really great engineer. And she just did many things really well. When she decided to do something, she put all her heart and soul into it. And because of her great intelligence and her discipline, she was able to do it well.”Overlookedis now available where books are sold.
source: people.com
