Galileo's Daughter: A Drama Of Science, Faith, And Love
Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9781857028614 (1857028619)
Publish date: October 7th 1999
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages no: 448
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
Biography,
History,
Cultural,
Italy,
Book Club,
Science,
Religion,
Astronomy,
Biography Memoir
Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has crafted a biography that dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishments of a mythic figure whose early-seventeenth-century clash with Cathol...
One-sentence summary: though it has the title Galileo's Daughter, this is an ordinary, relatively superficial, definitely uncritical biography of Galileo himself, with its only "innovation" being the interwoven portions of his daughter's 124 extant letters. A little background. Galileo had two dau...
So, given the title you'd think this would be about Galileo's daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, who he called "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me." Perhaps you might have thought that through her eyes--this account is partly based upon and includes several o...
After 150 pages I decided if this book didn’t end by smashing the patriarchy, I didn’t want to read anymore. And since it would end in 1642, I gave up. Say what you will about ‘the times,’ it’s impossible to buy the idea that a well-off, well-educated, intelligent and self-respecting public figure c...
Galileo's story was fascinating. I kind of felt like the letters from his daughter were kind of arbitrarily thrown in. They detracted from the presentation of Galileo's life. If Sobel wanted an excuse to show off the translated letters, I wish she would have focused more on Sour Maria Celeste's conv...