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Title: Galileo's Daughter : A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel, Fritz Weaver ISBN: 0-375-40938-6 Publisher: Random House Audio Voices Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 3 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.12 (191 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Best biography of Galileo I've read
Comment: This book is beautifully written, wonderfully accurate, and I fell in love with Galileo's daughter, who spent her entire life cloistered in a convent that would make Alcatraz seem like a five star hotel.
Sobel does a wonderful job of integrating Suer Maria Celeste's loving letters to her father with Galileo's science and his conflict with the Church. Her masterful pen brings that era's everyday life into sharp focus. My psychologist wife also loves this book.
As a trained scientist who happens to believe that God works naturally and that creation obeys the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, including evolution, I am frequently in discussion with my co-religionists who reject science in favor of 500-year-old dogmatic arguments. This book recounts those arguments and Galileo's responses under the Taliban-like power of the Church of his time.
This could happen to us.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not a good choice as audio book, but worth reading
Comment: I don't recommend listening to "Galileo's Daughter" as an audiobook--there's far too much flowery detail in the quoted letters, much of which I'd have skimmed in the text. I also found the reader's voice grating, at least for the first half of the book.
That might be because the first half of the book is far weaker than the second half--far less detailed than accounts I've read elsewhere of Galileo's early life prior to the publication of his controversial dialogue. The quoted letters from his elder daughter Maria Celeste are rather pedestrian.
The second half of the book compensates for these weaknesses. The reader starts to get a sense of Maria Celeste as a real person, and of the nature of her relationship with her father. The focus is still primarily on Galileo, but via Maria Celeste's no-longer-stilted letters and Sobel's writing, there's a view of Galileo that isn't seen in any other biography.
Ideally, read this and another of the Galileo biographies recommended by other reviewers. One book is not enough to fully explore all the aspects of this amazing man's life and work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Not only a great man, but a great father, too!
Comment: A historical Memoir of science, faith, and love. The book purports to use letters from Galileo's daughter to form the basis of this biography and they are certainly a major part of the book but they are hardly the backbone. Tucked away in a cloister, there is simply no way the daughter could keep up with the intrigue and politics that swirled around this brilliant man except through his letters to her - which, for the most part, are no longer existent. Still, it is a brilliant and vibrant biography because it paints Galileo as a man - often sick, always intense, and forever a dutiful father.
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Title: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel ISBN: 0140258795 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King ISBN: 0142000159 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 30 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 006099486X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo (1623-1633) (Penguin Classics) by Maria Celeste Galilei, Dava Sobel ISBN: 0142437158 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Illustrated Longitude by Dava Sobel, William J. H. Andrewes ISBN: 0802775934 Publisher: Walker & Company Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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