Customer Reviews

Maria Mitchell: The Soul of an Astronomer (Women of Spirit)

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"Maria Mitchell: The Soul of an Astronomer" is a must read biography for all Middle Schoolers. Maria Mitchell herself is probably one of the least known, of all the important people of the 19th century. Hopefully, that's going to change with several biographies (including this one) recently released, and a documentary film in the works. Taught by her father, she was more than just the first professional woman astronomer in the United States. She was the first woman AND American to be awarded the gold medal, for discovering a telescopic comet, from the King of Denmark; the first woman allowed into the Vatican Observatory, and the first woman AND person to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Maria Mitchell: The Soul of an Astronomer" takes you through her life beginning as a young girl growing up on Nantucket, assisting her father with the computations of ship chronometers for the local sailers, to her worldwide fame after her comet discovery in 1847, to her leadership as the first woman Professor of Astronomy (at Vassar College). This biography is targeted at 6th through 8th graders but is a great read for adults as well. Thoroughly researched, the book includes many photos of all the key people and places involved in her life and includes all the sources used.

Go to Nantucket Island, as I did earlier this month as a tourist, and ask the enthusiastic staff at the Visitor's Center for material on local heroine, astronomer Maria (pron. mah-RYE-ah) Mitchell (1818 - 1889). And you will be sent off well briefed to the library where she worked, to the homes where she lived and be introduced to an ever growing bibliography about America's first professional woman astronomer.

Astronomy displays two kinds of practitioners, people like Tycho Brahe who look and look and record and record, and the Keplers, Galileos, Newtons and others who also spin explanatory theories of what makes the heavenly bodies of the universe behave as they do. Maria Mitchell was definitely a Brahe, not a Newton. She discovered a comet in 1847 and won a major prize for it. But she was also a competent mathematician and knew and grew with all the evolving theories of astronomy. And all these things plus observational skills she taught from 1865 onward to young women as the first professor of astronomy and mathematics at brand new Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Maria Mitchell was born Quaker and lived and died a skeptical Unitarian. She was an outspoken supporter of women's rights to education, to practice professions and to be politically active. She was in her day as important in the women's movement as her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom her girls at Vassar met of an evening at Maria's sitting room at the foot of the college telescope.

Maria Mitchell loved astronomy, scoffed at "star gazing." If a belief was popular, she said, it could not be scientific. Reason and logic were her bedrock values. In this she resembled the later Russian-American writer Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982). Paradoxically she also foreshadowed the recently canonized German Saint Edith Stein (1891 -1942) murdered at Auschwitz, an early philosophical disciple of Edmund Husserl, father of phenomenology. All three women were passionate pursuers of truth and applied their minds to materials presented by their senses. Girls and young women do well to study their lives.

Biographer Beatrice Gormley's MARIA MITCHELL: THE SOUL OF AN ASTRONOMER is written for 9 to 12 year olds. But adults discovering America's first female astronomer through this book will be well positioned to delve further into Professor Mitchell, her writing skills, her wit, her dedication to the education of women and much more. They will enjoy the 16 pages of contemporary paintings or photos, the Index, the Sources and the Bibliography. This unpretentious little book does what it sets out to do: to introduce Maria Mitchell to enquiring, open minds.

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This book is a great biography! For anyone really not just young adults which I think that is how it is listed. The two books I have read in astronomy biographies all have one thing in common. Which is: William Herschel. "Whose the greatest man who ever lived?" And their kids all will reply: William Herschel. I enjoyed the biography on Caroline Herschel very much it is called: The Georgian Star which I have read about two years ago. This book tells about Maria Mitchell meeting their beloved Herschels. Her birth,family, religion, her shunning, her views, her gold medal for finding Comet 1874 VI(I think that's the number) a.k.a-Comet Mitchell, her interest in Double Stars, her trip to Europe, and life at Vassar College for women, and then her death. This book is a great reminder of what it takes to be an astronomer endurance, hard work, perseverance, loneliness, stubbornness, and determination plus a lot of computer knowledge...okay, maybe they didn't have that back then. But in today's world, computers are computers, add astronomy to the mix, and it is an entire new universe out there.