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Galileo: A Life

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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.

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

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.

In what could be considered an early case study and forunner to the famous Scopes monkey trial in the United States, the story about Galileo's life and unfortunate clash with the Catholic Church is a tale of humanity that unfortunately, never seems to die. James Reston has been able to accurately portray the dangerously volatile environment which often germinates when science and religion collide with each other, and he has done so within the framework of a life that was pure genius. It is not often easy to step back and to objectively juxtapose a beautiful life with the darkness of injustice and religous intolerance. James Reston's book has been able to accomplish just such a feat.

If you already know something about Galileo, this book will be a wonderful addition to your knowledge base. If you are a newcomer, this book is a good introduction, but it will leave you wishing you knew more about his experimental method, his scientific writing, and his inventions. This book places Galileo in the context of his time and place -- and showing how he influenced his era (and eras after) -- and it also leaves you wanting a more traditional biography that tells you more about what Galileo did.

This is a fine biography that brings to life one of the greatest men to advance our civilization.I read this book because I have always found the relationship of Galileo's ideas and the Roman Catholic Church to be one of the most intriguing chapters in church history. The book goes back to his childhood and highlights his major intellectual accomplishments and his relationships with family members and friends. His illegitimate children and how they were percieved by society was an eye opener. As a result he sent his daughters to the convent because no one would want to marry them. I wonder how many other women ended up nuns as a result? His days while attending school were very interesting, his university teaching jobs more interesting, his relationships with other intellectuals and politicians of his age even more interesting but his relationship after presenting his scientific theories on movement of the heavenly bodies the most fascinating. It makes you wonder about the church and some of the science that it is at odds with today won't be looked at years down the line as backwards and wrong as well. The time period of Galileo's life is brought to life to reveal all of its majesty and warts.I found myself wanting to read more about Galileo after reading this book and have since read another entitled "Galileo's Daughter." What a brilliant mind and tragic figure Galileo was. If you like history or biographies this will be a good book for you.

I read this book while visiting Florence and Rome this summer and the descriptions of Galileo's life in Renaissance Italy greatly enhanced the experience of that visit. It is an accessable account of Galileo's life for the general reader that for me captured the essence of the man.

Galileo: A Life is a masterpiece biography! I loved it! Well written, and so informative about this genius' struggle with the power of The Vatican. A must read for anyone who has an interest in astronomy and/or Italy!

This book gives a prime example of why our forefathers wanted to keep the Church and the Governemnt separate. What the church, the Catholic Church specifically, did to Galileo simply because he dared to embrace the belief that the earth revolved around the sun was tragic. Once again the author takes historical, truthful data and tells an emotional story of a tragic, historical event. This book is a must for everyone.

James Reston has written a very good book. He discusses many complicated aspects of science and religion, and yet he never gets bogged down in endless monotonous detail. Much of the relevance of Galileo's life comes from our now being in the grip of political correctness, much of it, let's face it, revolving around race, which we are now told, according to a recent series on Public Broadcasting, is simply an "illusion." (Genetic kinship groups an illusion?) It is remaniscent of some members of the Church who charged that the spots on the sun and the satellites around Jupiter, as discovered by Galileo and personally shown to them through his telescope, were "illusory," or "conjurors tricks." But at least the Church had an excuse, its religious doctrines having predated these scientific discoveries. Today's church of political correctness has no such excuse. On the brighter side, today only careers and reputations are burnt at the stake. Finally, no matter how good a book may be, it can always be improved. A very major storyline throughout the book was Galileo's many health struggles. Mostly by reading between the lines, it seems that much of the trouble was due to hypochondria. Or was it? The book screams out for a chapter devoted to spelling out exactly what these health problems were. That such a chapter was not included is doubly strange since Reston is so clearly analytical in other mysterious and complex areas, and also because you would think that this would be one subject that would be very amenable to informed historical speculation, looking at his symptoms in light of today's medicine, and so forth. In summary, despite this one very significant flaw of failing to come to terms directly with Galileo's ill health, this is a fine book that is very relevant four centuries later, particularly in light of today's enemies of the scientific method and the free discussion of its results.