Galileo's Daughter
A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith & Love
Dava Sobel
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
1999 Walker & Company
ISBN: 0802713432

As much a biography of the father of modern physics, the inventor of telescopes & the revealer of a new reality that set the thinking of the world on its ears, this is also a portrait of a woman of exquisite mind & singular goodness who has been lost to history.

What an immersion in the life & times of this musician's son! In an Italy at the apogee of the Holy Office of the Inquisition's power - reminding me of the McCarthy Hearings 400 years later; the height of influence of arguably the greatest Italian family - the Medicis; when bubonic plague & war devastated a third of the people of Europe; when the one & only religion was on the defensive against the new & troubling Protestant Reformation. It was also a time when science & religion were seen to be in mortal combat.

Within this passionate urban swirl of life a young man learns the skills that will make him, in his maturity, the foremost & most controversial scientist of his time.

Dava Sobel has woven a rich & detailed tapestry of a fabled & fascinating century from the viewpoint of a simple, hungry man who became a teacher, a philosopher & a scientist. He was the first person to see the Moon through a lens he designed as well as charting its surface. He charted the orbits of Jupiter's moons & other celestial bodies. As he studied the Heavens he also exposed the dreadful news that it was the Sun which was the center of our Universe & not Earth.

Just as Charles Darwin exposed the Theory of Evolution some 300 years later & stepped into a dangerous arena of disbelief, discredit & dishonor, Galileo Galilei had to face a much harsher, immediate threat: the Inquisition which had, by his time, perfected gruesome & deadly techniques of dissuasion & abjuration.

As a devout & obedient son of The Church, Galileo submitted his findings on the cycle of tides & anything else his brilliant mind thought up, picking young & friendly bishops into whose hands he delivered his papers.

It seems wonderful to have a purpose in life whether it be an avocation to life as a nun; as companion in thought & support to a father who sees the Heavens as no one before; to be privy to ideas that trouble almost everybody, especially those in power. This is Dava Sobel's gift. She brings to life a devoted daughter, a life-long sister of the Saint Clare nuns who, nonetheless, did her duty by her father & brother.

Out of necessity due to her short life & few letters, Galileo's daughter is the rare golden thread that occasionally glitters among the heavy weave of a seething society & Dava Sobel has written a long draught of that history, dense with details of Italian life, European nations & the ways of the aristocracy & papacy.

Also by Dava Sobel: Longitude
(07/30/00)

Rebecca