YVONNE CLARK AND HER ENGINEERING SPARK

A buoyant profile of Yvonne Clark (1929-2019), a lifelong tinkerer with a knack for making everything work better, from the family toaster to giant rockets.

Dubbing his former college teacher’s “remarkable spark for building and fixing things” a “superpower,” Wells takes her through a series of hands-on projects—beginning with malfunctioning household appliances that she methodically disassembled and studied as a child to later work solving pesky design problems in both a new type of rifle and in NASA’s humongous Saturn V rocket. The author also celebrates the stubborn determination that won Clark a post–World War II career in mechanical engineering and a university position despite the discrimination she encountered as a Black woman in a field dominated by white men. From overall-clad child to brisk, sensibly attired adult, her confidence and strength of character shine in Hodge’s illustrations as she wields hand tools, pores over blueprints, marches into groups of stymied-looking male colleagues to explain her solutions, and climactically stands in quiet triumph with a racially diverse group of children to watch the successful 1967 test launch of the first unmanned Saturn V rocket. That same confidence radiates from the appended photos, which take her from teenager to octogenarian.

Inspirational fare for aspiring engineers and scientists.