Galileo: A Life [Hardcover]

James Reston (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 006016378X | ISBN-13: 978-0060163785 | Publication Date: April 1994

Vividly depicting the brilliant scientist and dramatically portraying the turbulence and richness of the era in which he lived, a chronicle of Galileo's career focuses on his invention of the telescope, which forced a dangerous confrontation with the Inquisition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) may seem an unlikely subject for Reston, who has previously chronicled Jim Jones, John Connally and the clash of baseball's Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti. But Galileo, like Reston's present-day subjects, was at once a man deeply imbedded in and polarized by his milieu and its surrounding force fields. Reston delineates the personal and institutional storms that Galileo endured and seemed unerringly to seek out. He collided with church authorities in Rome, with his peers and a succession of patrons. Reston scants both science and 17th-century theology in setting the stage for the general reader, but he recreates the era with immediacy by mining Galileo's journals and letters for dialogue. The use of present tense gives the characters a magnified, flesh-and-blood presence that neatly balances with the Galileo legend. Reston suggests that the spirit of Galileo's age still lives today in the Vatican. Newbridge Book Club alternate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

We've all heard about him, but how many of us have read much about the great Galileo? Reston here offers a popular biography that takes in the sweep of Renaissance Italy.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (April 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006016378X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060163785
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,766,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Craters and All, February 28, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Galileo: A Life (Paperback)

Reston does a lot with this. He captures the bad side of the Pope's insistence that Galileo refrain from describing the surface of the moon as anything other than perfectly smooth, shiny, and sinless. Because of course Adam and Eve had not sinned up there. Like Galileo, Reston also catalogues some of the surface imperfections of his subject, and what they suggest about his mindset and his world.

The family portrait of Galileo's two daughters, both shunted off to a convent, is tragic, and Reston penetrates this sub-unit of his topic convincingly, getting into how one daughter became pious, while another become embittered. The idea of using the Church for refuge for your daughters is intersting, since the same Church was leaning on Galileo.

This book is a great tour of the man behind the discoveries, the math equations and the historic controversies. The feel of the Italian city states of the Renaissance also comes out in this book, and it's no coincidence that the family and clan-based capitalism of Galileo's patrons had to precede or lay the groundwork for someone of Galileo's talents to really produce something.

This book is hard to put down. Good to take on a vacation.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A FINE ADDITION TO THE BIOGRAPHIES OF AN IMPORTANT FIGURE, September 20, 2005

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Galileo: A Life (Paperback)

Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), sometimes called the founder of modern experimental science, butted heads with church authorities, his colleagues, and a number of his patrons.

As recently as little more than a decade ago, the voice of this indefatigable genius was heard again when, some 350 years after being accused, tried and condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for espousing the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun, the Vatican admitted that it was wrong about Galileo.

Galileo's father taught his son music and encouraged him to become a doctor. But, while studying medicine and the philosophy of Aristotle at the University of Pisa, Galileo made his first important discovery - the law of the pendulum. From then on he turned his attention to mathematics.

The time of Galileo is brilliantly evoked by James Reston in this splendidly researched story of an idealistic and egotistical genius. By chronicling Galileo's life in the first person and utilizing his journals, the story becomes an enthralling one for readers as the conflict between science and religion escalates.

Reston's work is a fine addition to the biographical history of one of the most important figures in Western culture.

- Gail Cooke

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Galileo: A Life, January 7, 2006

By 

R. Murphy (Kimbolton, OHIO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Galileo: A Life (Paperback)

If you are looking for a biography that discusses Galileo's scientific work, you will be disappointed. Reston must, of course, mention this great thinker's discoveries, but that is as far as it goes. There is little about the influence of his discoveries on the scientific community or how it shaped the world afterwards. I would have expected this to be one of the central themes considering the subject of this biography. The book deals almost exclusively with Galileo's struggles with the church. It is obvious that Reston has no scientific background. He should have picked someone else to write about.