Galileo's daughter [electronic resource] : a historical memoir of science, faith, and love / Dava Sobel.
Material type: SoundPublisher: New York : Books on Tape, [2008]Content type:- spoken word
- computer
- unspecified
- 9781415953402
- 520/.92 B 22
- QB36.G2 S65 2008ab
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Digital Content | Bedford Public Library Online Resource | eAudio (Overdrive) | Available | 9781415953402 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
Read by Fritz Weaver
Three Cassettes, 5 Hours
Galileo's Daughter introduces us to the man whose belief that the Earth moved around the sun caused him to be brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and threatened with torture. In contrast, his daughter Virginia chose the quiet life of a cloistered nun. Sobel takes us through the trials and triumphs of Galileo's career and his familial relationships, and simultaneously illuminates an entire era of flamboyant Medici Grand Dukes, the bubonic plague, and history's most dramatic collusion between science and religion.
Downloadable audio file.
Duration: 10:48:42.
Title from: Title details screen.
Unabridged.
Read by George Guidall.
Galileo Galilei was the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. His telescopes allowed him to reveal the heavens and enforce the astounding argument that the earth moves around the sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest. Galileo's oldest child was thirteen when he placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her support was her father's greatest source of strength. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Requires OverDrive Media Console (file size: 155410 KB).
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Like Sobel's best-selling Longtitude, this is a compelling and gracefully written science history, retelling the familiar story of Galileo's battle with the Roman Catholic Church through the letters of his daughter, a cloistered nun. What results is a new view of the scientist. (LJ 10/1/99) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
Despite its title, this impressive book proves to be less the story of Galileo's elder daughter, the oldest of his three illegitimate children, and more the story of Galileo himself and his trial before the Inquisition for arguing that Earth moves around the Sun. That familiar tale is given a new slant by Sobel's translationÄfor the first time into EnglishÄof the 124 surviving letters to Galileo by his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, a Clarisse nun who died at age 33; his letters to her are lost, presumably destroyed by Maria Celeste's convent after her death. Her letters may not in themselves justify a book; they are devout, full of pious love for the father she addresses as "Sire," only rarely offering information or insight. But Sobel uses them as the accompaniment to, rather than the core of, her story, sounding the element of faith and piety so often missing in other retellings of Galileo's story. For Sobel shows that, in renouncing his discoveries, Galileo acted not just to save his skin but also out of a genuine need to align himself with his church. With impressive skill and economy, she portrays the social and psychological forces at work in Galileo's trial, particularly the political pressures of the Thirty Years' War, and the passage of the plague through Italy, which cut off travel between Florence, where Galileo lived, and Rome, the seat of the Pope and the Inquisition, delaying Galileo's appearance there and giving his enemies time to conspire. In a particularly memorable way, Sobel vivifies the hard life of the "Poor Clares," who lived in such abject poverty and seclusion that many were driven mad by their confinement. It's a wholly involving tale, a worthy follow-up (after four years) to Sobel's surprise bestseller, Longitude. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedCHOICE Review
All have heard of Galileo, but not many have heard of Galileo's daughter, Virginia, who, born out of wedlock, was entrusted to a nunnery. Suor Maria Celeste, as she came to be called, was pious and bright, affectionate, and dedicated to her father. Father and daughter corresponded regularly through letters, though they lived not too many miles apart. They wrote to each other on matters of significance as well as trivialities. Her fond letters soon became a source of immense strength for her genius-father, especially in his later years. Only the daughter's missives have survived; the father's have perished beyond a trace. In this fascinating book, written with much grace, intelligence, and erudition, writer Sobel recreates for the reader, through the letters, the science and related conflicts of the time, and the social conditions and the ecclesiastic adamancy surrounding Galileo. The letters reveal that the great scientist was also a deeply sensitive man of faith, who had the intelligence to know that if reason and observation spoke differently about the world, that was a greater revelation from God than any ancient texts holy because of age. The letters also show the deep love and caring that Suor Celeste had for her aging father. The world of scholarship is indebted to Sobel for bringing to light one more human side of Galileo. All levels. V. V. Raman; Rochester Institute of TechnologyBooklist Review
As often is the case with religious landmarks in history--in this instance, Galileo's prostration before the Inquisition--a deeper searching reveals more textures than simple science-versus-religion symbolism. But it takes a talented storyteller to bring them forth, and Sobel meets our high expectations with this work, the legacy of her account of the inventor of the seagoing chronometer in Longitude (1995). Sobel is aided by a unique resource: more than 100 letters to Galileo from his eldest daughter that have never before been published in translation. They appear here largely verbatim and have been skillfully integrated into the contextual events of early 1600s Italy--no mean narrative feat, considering that this daughter, who took the veil and the name Maria Celeste, never in her short adult life ventured beyond her order's walls. The letters' somewhat trepidant salutation, "Most Illustrious and Beloved Lord Father," belies what was apparently a profoundly fond relationship on a filial level (a conclusion supported by the surprise Sobel springs at the end), but it was respectful on an intellectual one: there are allusions to Maria Celeste copying over Galileo's Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the work that attracted the ire of the inquisitors. Their lives are set in motion against a background that includes family finances, Florentine and papal politics, the bubonic plague, and the Copernican revolution, which Galileo was championing as discreetly as was safe to do. Succinct in describing where, and where not, Galileo was heading in correct scientific direction (he didn't understand tides, for example), Sobel connects the tempests of his world to the cares and anxieties of Maria Celeste's. "A woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me," eulogized the father when she suddenly died amidst his persecutions, an aptly allusive summing up of the subject of Sobel's singularly affecting story. --Gilbert TaylorKirkus Book Review
Sobel, author of the bestselling Longitude (1995), has elegantly translated the letters Galileo's eldest child, Virginia, wrote to him and uses them as a leitmotif to illuminate their deep mutual love, religious faith, and dedication to science. Yes, Galileo had a daughter, in fact two daughters and a son, the illegitimate offspring of a liaison with a Venetian beauty. Both daughters, considered unmarriageable because of their illegitimacy, became nuns in a convent south of Florence, not far from where Galileo had homes. But Virginia, as Suor Maria Celeste, was deeply involved in her father's life work, even transcribing his writings, while managing convent affairs and serving as baker, nurse, seamstress, and apothecary. Thus, we learn that Galileo was often confined to bed with incapacitating illnesses and that he treasured the medicines as well as the sweets and cakes his daughter provided. He was also something of a bon vivant, enjoying the wines produced by his vineyards, writing ribald and humorous verse as well as literary criticism. Indeed, his celebrated Dialogues were conceived as dramas involving three persons, with one playing the role of simpleton as foil for the two. In the end, it was the Dialogues that argued for the Copernican view that the Earth moved around the Sun, which invoked the wrath of Pope Urban VIII, who had earlier been a loyal friend and supporter of Galileo. The subsequent trial in Rome ended with Galileo's recantation and his banishment first to Siena, and then to house arrest in Florence. Sobel provides a few correctives to tradition and fills out the cast of personae who were Galileo's chief defenders and enemies. But it's the deft apposition of the devoted and pious letters of Suor Maria Celeste that add not only verisimilitude, but depth to the character of the writer and her father'revealed as a man of great intellect as well as religious faith and lovingkindness. Alas, his letters to her are lost. (First printing of 75,000)Author notes provided by Syndetics
Dava Sobel was born in the Bronx, New York on June 15, 1947. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She is a former New York Times science reporter and has contributed articles to Audubon, Discover, Life, Harvard Magazine, and The New Yorker.She has written several science related books including Letters to Father, The Planets, and A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love won the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology and a 2000 Christopher Award. She has co-authored six books with astronomer Frank Drake including Is Anyone Out There? She also co-authored with William J. H. Andrewes The Illustrated Longitude.
Because her work provides awareness of science and technology to the general public, she has received the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board in 2001, the Bradford Washburn Award in 2001,the Klumpke-Roberts Award in 2008, and the Eduard Rhein Foundation in Germany in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)