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Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love Paperback – SHM-CD, September 4, 2011
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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 Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion-the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics-indeed of modern science altogether." It is also a stunning portrait of Galileo's daughter, a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."
Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. During that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, Galileo sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. Filled with human drama and scientific adventure, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story.
Praise for Galileo's Daughter :
"[Sobel] shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas...are pithy, vivid, and intelligible."-Wall Street Journal
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication dateSeptember 4, 2011
- Dimensions5.55 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100802779654
- ISBN-13978-0802779656
- Lexile measure1530L
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Editorial Reviews
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“Sobel is a master storyteller.... What she has done, with her choice of excerpts and her strong sense of story, is bring a great scientist to life.” ―Alan Lightman, New York Times
“[Sobel] shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas... are pithy, vivid, and intelligible.” ―Wall Street Journal
“Sobel does wonders clearly explaining scientific principles... [She] is a most original writer, with a reverence for history and storytelling.” ―USA Today
“Galileo's Daughter is a remarkable work for the beauty of the writing and the clarity of the time and relationships it creates. Sobel pays close attention to fine detail, resulting in a work that feels real.” ―Denver Post
“Sobel seamlessly recounts history as wonderful narrative filled with outsized characters all marching toward a booming climax.” ―San Diego Union Tribune
About the Author
Dava Sobel (born June 15, 1947) is the author of Longitude, Galileo's Daughter, The Planets, and A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. A former staff science reporter for The New York Times, she has also written for numerous magazines, including Discover, Harvard Magazine, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker.
Her most unforgettable assignment at the Times required her to live 25 days as a research subject in the chronophysiology lab at Montefiore Hospital, where the boarded-up windows and specially trained technicians kept her from knowing whether it was day outside or night.
Her work has won recognition from the National Science Board, which gave her its 2001 Individual Public Service Award "for fostering awareness of science and technology among broad segments of the general public." She also received the 2004 Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in England and the 2008 Klumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for "increasing the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy."
A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, she has taught several seminars in science writing at the university level, and held a two-year residency at Smith College in fall 2013.
Product details
- Publisher : Bloomsbury USA; Book Club Edition. (September 4, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0802779654
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802779656
- Lexile measure : 1530L
- Item Weight : 15.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.55 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #137,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #255 in Astronomy (Books)
- #355 in Scientist Biographies
- #1,729 in Women's Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Dava Sobel (born June 15, 1947, The Bronx, New York) is an American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. Her books include Longitude, about English clockmaker John Harrison, and Galileo's Daughter, about Galileo's daughterMaria Celeste.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Ragesoss (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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* However erudite I might smugly think I am about the merits of well-written non-fiction, I was simply blown away by the emotional firepower of the conclusion of this book.
* I have been to Florence many times, and have visited the Church of Santa Croce during each visit, where Galileo's tomb resides today on the same floor as the legendary Michelangelo and Machiavelli.
* If I had read something like Sobel's book 10 years ago, it would have sparked a burst of emotions heretofore missing in those visits, similar to splashing a million colors onto a blank canvas, or in the case of Galileo's tomb, injecting life onto a slab of colorless marble.
* The amazing beauty of this work is that it reads like a novel, or more to the point, it paints pictures reminiscent of the language of cinema. It is historical, factual and meticulous. Yet it is not TOO detailed.
* Unlike typical historical treatments of people whose accomplishments are regarded so magnificent that they are automatically given an entrance ticket into the pantheon of immortality, Sobel's story of Galileo and his relationship with his daughter is engrossing, spellbinding and bereft of the technical minutiae that bogs down many works of non-fiction.
* Too often, authors attempting to bring life to the thoughts and actions of great figures, go so overboard with tiny details that they undercut their own efforts. They disrupt the narrative momentum so critical to good old fashioned story-telling. There's nothing worse than to read half way down a page and then realize that you missed everything crammed so badly into two paragraphs that you're forced to read them again.
* "Galileo's Daughter" is a work of non-fiction and an easy read, despite its potentially forbidding subject. While much verbiage is expended about the master's fight to prove Copernicus' theory of a sun-centered galaxy, in the face of recriminations and potential persecutions from the Catholic Church, the author's method of tackling this issue is unlike anything you will ever find in a boring textbook. The result is pure entertainment, like watching a drama about a clash of ideas and egos, the stuff movies are made of.
* After a while, you are lulled into thinking that the title of Sobel's book is merely a subtext to what is really Galileo's story. His daughter's letters simply humanize the "legend" of Galileo, transforming him into a domestic, a real person, a parent with the normal concerns for his children. For all of his cranial powers, Galileo is not so self-absorbed that he abrogates his responsibilities as a father. He comes off as a concerned parent who endeavors to provide the best for his children.
* But then the twist! You think you know where this story is going because after all, this is a work of non-fiction! But you're wrong!
* By the end of "Galileo's Daughter," author Sobel finds an ingenious way to circle back to what is inferred by the title of his book, despite the preponderance of words expended on Galileo himself.
* The result is a stunner.
* If you buy this book, and I recommend you do, DON'T cheat and go to its last few pages. If you do, you'll deprive yourself of the emotional impact of a revelation that may be common knowledge to some, but in reality is obscure to the greater body of people who think they know history.
* "Galileo's Daughter" is a marvelous achievement. If all non-fiction works were written this way, I'd stop going to the movies.
By
Dava Sobel
(Penguin Books 2000)
Sour Marie Celeste was the illegitimate daughter of Galileo Galelei - the eldest of his three, and only, children At the age of 13 her father had her admitted to the convent of San Mateo in Arcetri, where she would remain until her death at the age of 34 in 1634. Once admitted, or shortly thereafter, she started writing letters to her father - the most loving, beautiful, intelligent letters I have ever read. There aren't too many of them, but they have been preserved and form the excuse (if that is the right word) for this book - which is a part history of the life of Galileo, part comment on his times and a setting to publish the letters chronologically along with and in tune with events in his life.
Every school child knows something about Galileo - whether it was his "invention" of the telescope (he didn't invent it; he improved it immeasurably) or his "discovery" of the fact that it was the earth which revolved around the sun rather than vice versa - and this too was wrong, He didn't "discover" this. The sun-centered universe (heliocentered) had been discovered and described by Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) in 1543, 21 years before Galileo was born in 1564. Using Copernican theory Tycho Brahe (1545-61) had fixed the positions of may stars both as to distance and location and Johannes Kepler (1591-1630) had established the planetary motion of the planets - or most of them. So it wasn't what he invented or what he "discovered" that eventually got him into trouble with the Catholic Church, it was the fact that he was by far the most gifted and the most prominent man to have advocated - or thought to advocate - the heresy of a heliocentered universe.
He had been a star from the start, one of the most gifted mathematicians of his age or any other, one of the few who, instead of taking things as they are said to be, tried to find out how they really are. And thus was one of the first true scientists, a man who dropped balls of different weights from the tower of Pisa, who rolled balls of different weight and different sizes down inclines of different pitches, who measured the tides, floating bodies - always studying motion and/or the laws of motion - and almost all of modern physics is the study of motion whether it's string theory - action at a distance - or general relativity or the measurement of the effect of a collision of protons in the CORE tunnel in Switzerland this summer.
He was always an academician, teaching mathematics at the University of Pisa or Padua or being the resident mathematician and experimenter for one of the Medici's. And on retainer to the same. He was always ill. He never married. His work was his spouse. However, he recognized his three children by his liaison with the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice. Domestic life was not for him. To the end he worked and thought, living as a guest or retainer in many ducal palaces in Tuscany and Rome. He lived as an untitled man at the highest level of worldly or ecclesiastical aristocracy. He made enemies - many of them - but he persevered and died in a kind of house arrest at the age of 72, still working and under banishment for daring to support the idea that the earth moved about the sun which the Catholic Church, relying on Aristotelian and Pythagorean thought and on the literal word of Holy Scripter believed as holy writ that it was the sun which revolved about the earth.
I have just spoken of his many enemies and of the ducal residences in which he often made his abode: and the book is full of this detail - too full in my opinion. It would have been better if much of this had either been omitted or if Ms. Sobel had taken the time to tell us something about the governance of his time, I would have been much better informed had I known something of the Medici's or the Doges of Venice or the politics of the Popes who were involved in his life. And I would like to have known more about how people lived in his time.
Similarly I would have liked to know more about convent life. There is enough in the book to indicate that it was perfectly dreadful -cruel, inhuman by our standards. Hared work, cold water, bad food, no rest, small quarters, iron discipline and no sleep. The Hanoi Hilton in San Matteo. Why would anybody lived this way? And why did Galileo put his daughters "away" at age 13. He robbed them of a life! (The excuse given by Sobel is that he learned he had known enemies in court because of his success and wanted to protect them; but this doesn't wash with me. All he had to do was to acknowledge them and, as his heirs, they would have properly evaded his enemy's attempts to take his property. I think he put them away because he was selfish. He didn't want three illegitimate children to be staining his record as he surged his way upward, buoyed by talent and reputation.)
As Galileo stepped through his professional life he wrote to Sour Marie Celeste, but his letters did not survive. Her replies and her spontaneous letters to him did survive, however, and manly of them are quoted here. Would that all children would love their father so much. Would that any one of us would have a child as intelligent, as articulate as she. Would that she were here today - or those like her - to call our attention to enduring love as contrasted to the conditions in which we live.
There are a couple of other comments I want to get down here on paper before I quit. First - about Galileo's "Trial". It is covered accurately and well in the book. In brief Galileo had published in Dialogues the essence of Copernican thought spoken through the mouth of a neutral that was just saying what it was. Then there were two characters, one of which was Galileo under a false name, who discussed it. Thus he never on paper espoused the Copernican heresy. He just said what it was. He thought he had a deal with Cardinal Bellarmino (later Saint Bellarmine) that as long as he didn't teach or espouse it he was not in conflict with Church teaching. However, 15 years later he fell out of favor with Pope Urban VIII. His enemies in the Vatican called on the Inquisition to question him and it was as the result of this that he was sentenced to house arrests.
The trial is well covered in the book, but I wish Sobel had told us more about the Inquisition, how long it lasted, what it did, what procedures were followed, how it was independent (if it was) of the Vatican. What was the Index? What happened to people who wrote things that made their way to the Index of banned books? What kind of books? How many?
I also wish she had told us more about the thirty Years War because it is frequently mentioned and apparently played a direct role in the attitude of the Catholic Church at the time.
Woven through out this history of Galileo's life and the beautiful love expressed by his daughter (who was every bit as bright as he was) is the conflict between science and religion. Sobel never addresses it. But it's pretty clear to me. Religious belief cannot overrule, change or ignore true scientific discovery. And the greatest conflicts in this area have been the Galileo incident with respect to the heliocentered universe and Darwinism. God made the world and He made the rules of nature and God doesn't bend, break or ignore His rules because they are contrary to the ideas of His people
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excellent quality
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