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Summary: Lucid, Moving Biography of The Father of Modern Science
Review: Dava Sobel's extraordinarily readable biography of Galileo is as much a portrait of the mind of a genius as it is a tapestry of Renaissance Italy. What infuses this masterful book with life, however, are the quirky, intelligent letters written to him by his daughter. Cloistered in a convent from the time she was a young girl, Suor Maria Celeste's loving correspondence to her father reveals the human side of Galileo. But the scope of Sobel's book encompasses more than the sum of its parts - in the final analysis, we are treated to the inner workings of a surprisingly "modern" approach to science (not least of which was the concept of a sun centered planetary system) in the face of malevolent censorship by the Catholic church. When Galileo is condemned of heresy, Sobel's book illuminates the political machinations behind the church's case, so that we understand the motivations (some of them nasty and personal) that fueled the fire. More importantly, we feel for the all too frail Galileo, under house arrest in the twilight of his life, and cheer when the centuries finally celebrate the genius that he was. I won't spoil the ending for you, but it is a genuinely moving surprise. Brava Dava Sobel!
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Summary: A Fine Work Better Titled: "Galileo and His Daughter"
Review: Despite this book's title, it is more a biography of Galileo enhanced by actual letters from his daughter than a biography of the daughter herself. Yet, the lives of the two were specially connected. She was every bit a part of his life; he composed the major part of hers. Sister Maria Celeste (the daughter) lived the majority of her life restricted to the grounds of a convent outside of Florence. She only saw Galileo when he came to visit her. Consequently, her letters to her father take the form of a omnipotent narrative. The author capably intersperses these letters to relate periods in Galileo's life. Although his letters to his daughter have unfortunately been lost, this fact, in my opinion, actually increases the intrigue of the book. Galileo lives through his actions and through the words of his most loving observer, his daughter. Beyond this basic framework, the book provides a compelling tale of Galileo's scientific discoveries, his struggles with the Catholic Church, and his personal fortitude. Galileo is presented as the pioneer of a new methodology in scientific discovery - learning through observation, postulation, and experimentation; not mere philosophical meandering. His struggle for acceptance of what is observable, instead of what may be theoretically preferable, is a struggle that continues to this day. At the same time, the author details interesting aspects of the daughters conventary lifestyle, and illustrates the political and social issues of the time. Most importantly, however, final judgment regarding Galileo, his character, and his treatment by the church is left to the reader. This book is well-deserving of all its praise and certainly worth a read.
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Summary: Refreshing Perspective
Review: From the title of this book, I naturally expected it to be a biography of Galileo's daughter, which it is not exactly. I was a bit disappointed to begin with, as the first hundred pages or so are Galileo's early biography. Once his daughter, Virginia (later Suor Marie Celeste) came into the picture, the story became much more interesting. Virginia was one of Galileo's three illegitimate children by the mistress of his early years, Marina Gamba. She eventually married, with Galileo's blessings, and he never lost interest in his children. Due to their illegitimacy which he felt would eliminate any chance of a decent marriage, Galileo had his two daughters entered into a convent at a very early age. The both became nuns at the convent of San Matteo on turning sixteen, Virginia taking the name Suor Marie Celeste and Livia that of Suor Arcangela. The son, Vincenzio, lived with Galileo in his late teens and eventually (after an unpromising start) became a good son to him. This book recounts Galileo's personal and private life, using letters from Marie Celeste to give color to what would otherwise be a black and white, straight forward biography. Their shared love is beautiful to see in her letters--his to her having been lost--and the bits and pieces of every day life that she treats the reader to are thoroughly enjoyable. This is a very detailed and readable history of Galileo, and gave me a much greater understanding of the man, his work and his difficulty with the Church. The conflict he felt between himself and his discoveries comes through very clearly and poignantly in his own words through his other letters. Her faith in him, and in the fact that he was not being heretical, is very apparent. It was interesting to me to see how differently Sobel portrays Galileo's fight was the Church--if her sources are to be believed (and I see no reason to disbelieve) it was not at all what history textbooks would have us believe. As a history major and fanatic, I truly enjoyed reading this book. The alternate perspective of Galileo was refreshing and real--and made sense of a lot that had previously seemed murky to me about him and the Church. The addition of Marie Celeste's letters gave this book personality and took Galileo from a science god to a human being. My only regret is how few letters are in this book, and that the title is a bit misleading. Despite that, if you have any interest in Galileo, this is a must-read!
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Summary: Science and Love
Review: Galileo Galilei is often called the first modern scientist, who only believed facts if they could be verified by experiment. The story of his scientific discoveries and his near fatal conflict with the reactionaries of the inquisition, is both gripping and tragic. But, Dava Sobel adds to it the poignant story of Galileo's relationship with his eldest daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, a nun of the Poor Clare order in a convent outside Florence. Her voice, which comes to us through her letters, is that of a daughter who loved her father deeply, fully understood what he was trying to do and always supported him in his struggles. From her letters, and other documents used by Sobel, (Galileo's own letters were apparently destroyed), we also get a clear picture of the conditions of life in seventeenth century Europe, and of the developing network of intellectuals who contributed to the enlightenment. In addition to the conflict with the church which dominated Galileo's life, he had to cope with several periods during which the plague ravaged the communities in which he lived, and eventually the death from dysentry of his beloved daughter at the age of thirty four. The reader is not only informed but deeply moved by this most humane book
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Summary: A complete memoir
Review: I thought this would be historical fiction, a novel, and when its turn came to read, and I picked it up to figure out what it was, I got really excited about what I was about to learn. Inside the front cover, it reads, "Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics -- indeed of modern science altogher." I noted the diagrams and illustrations of the people, Galileo's equations and inventions.
But what I didn't anticipate was the kind of learning I would be exposed to and how moving the book would be. It turned out to be one of the best books I've ever read, incorporating so many facets in a well-written memoir that challenged and fulfilled.
Of course, I learned quite a bit about the advance of understanding of science and the universe from the story of Galileo's life. His father wanted him to be a physician, but he preferred mathematics and matriculated at the University in Pisa. From there, he took various positions in Italy, eventually ending up as court philosopher and mathematician for the Medici family in Florence. Under their patronage, he was able to maintain the income of a professorship in another city without having to show up to teach. He invented tools to supplement his income, and had three children with a woman he didn't marry, two daughters and a son. The daughters he placed in a convent in Florence, thinking they would be unlikely to marry due to their illegitimacy (apparently, scholars often remained unmarried), and the son he eventually legitimized through a church action. Sobel writes of the progression of Galileo's understanding of the universe after procuring a telescope and modifying it to improve his vision of the sky. He also concentrated heavily on the laws of motion.
Galileo was deeply religious and deeply devoted to the Catholic Church; he was also "connected" through his work as court philosopher for the Medicis in Florence. Though the pope who preceded Urban VIII was not a friend to Galileo and resisted Galileo's advancement of Copernicus's theory of the sun as the center of the universe, rather than the earth, Urban VIII knew Galileo, and the mathematician was able to have an audience with him soon after he ascended to the office. (Though this relationship would have to submit in the end to Urban's declining political position and would not save Galileo from the inquisitors.)
What emerges here is the incredible control over the minds of its subjects the Catholic church enjoyed/enforced in Italy in the 1500s and 1600s. While those Catholics outside Italy were more likely to dispense with papal orders, those within Italy lived in a society structured to control them rigorously. Loyal Galileo, while writing his Dialogue that sought to educate readers on the various theories of the movement of the universe, submitted his work to official inquisitors, the pope's advisers, etc., and willingly changed what they instructed him to out of deference to the church.
The daughter of this book's title is Virginia, whose name became Maria Celeste when she took her vows as a Poor Clare in her convent near Florence. Her younger sister also took vows at the convent, but was not close to her father, and was an unwilling, whining, hypochondriacal nun. In this book, Suor Maria Celeste's 100-plus letters to her father are translated and published for the first time in English, inserted into the narrative in response to events Sobel is reporting in Galileo's life. The letters are sweet and respectful, and show Maria Celeste's dependence on her father for resources as well as her willingness to do for him. She mixed him remedies in the convent's pharmacy, cooked sweets for him and rewrote his manuscripts for him as asked. The two could only visit through a grill at the convent, as Maria Celeste could never leave the grounds, but her letters (his to her did not survive) show a doting, close and mutually rewarding relationship between Galileo and his older daughter.
The book brings to life the daily routines and realities of early 17th century life in Italy, as Sobel makes real what life would be like without clocks, long difficult journeys, onlsaughts of the plague and political intrigues at the Vatican and the local inquisitors'. These tangential explanations, along with the recounting of Galileo's trial in Rome for his DIALOGUE, and his personal and religious sadness over being listed on the church's Index of Prohibited Books, and his daughter's responses and caretaking love of her father, make Galileo a real man, rather than an ancient archetype or a note on a timeline. We see what his questioning intellect cost him and the pleasure and sustenance he derived from his close relationship with his loving and faithful daughter.
The final pages of the book contain such a moving and tender apotheosis of the relationship between Galileo and Suor Maria Celeste. While the book was fabulous, the ending was fulfilling in a wholly unexpected way. I'm grateful for this book, for all I learned from it, and for all I came to understand.
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Summary: Compelling start, halting finish
Review: The first half of Dava Sobel's "Galileo's Daughter" is, in a word, gripping. Especially enticing to people interested in history, literature, and science, the first half of this book is a slice of life, albeit an extraordinary one. It also is a lesson in culture/religion (inseparable in the Catholic Church of the time), and its battle with burgeoning scientific knowledge. The contradiction in this book is that at the moment when Galileo's life should become the most interesting, the book loses momentum. The backbone of the memoir, the letters of Galileo's daughter (a cloistered nun), revealed little to me beyond the narrow scope of the more mundane aspects of life. Finances, illness, poverty. Perhaps this is what interests some readers; I will admit it was eye-opening to learn about the way life was lived in the 17th century. In anticipating this book, I was looking for more insight into Galileo beyond the history books. What I got, for example, was a painstaking explanation of how to deal with wine left to spoil in a cask.
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Summary: Best biography of Galileo I've read
Review: 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: 
Summary: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Galileo's Daughter
Review: While there are many things to recommend this book, I found it less interesting to read than I had hoped, and hence, have given it only three stars. My dissatisfaction derives from the fact that this book relies for its substance on the surviving letters of Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo's cloistered daughter. This means that Sobel's book can't concentrate either on the fascinating life of Galileo or the life of the cloistered nun in Italy in the seventeenth century, but rather attempts to recreate the relationship of a father and his daughter through her fawning letters. In fairness, Suor Maria Celeste does seem like a remarkable woman. Her writing style, while cloying, is impressive. Her life was one of incredible privation, and she was amazingly devoted both to her father and to her Saviour. That being said, there is precious little addition insight to be gained from reading the book itself. Suor Maria Celeste's endless exhortations of recourse to faith in God while the Catholic Church, the instrument of God's work on earth attempts to silence her father from saying that the Earth orbits the Sun, seems inexplicable. I wondered if persons of faith, particularly Catholics, might be moved by this attitude, but for us non-believers, the endless upbeat faith in God's goodness in the face of privation and injustice perpetrated in the name of that same God seemed both maddening and mystifying. In short, I came away from this book with no sense of what moved Galileo's daughter. Yes, she clearly loved God and loved her father, but the reader suspected that at the outset. I found little of substance in the book to aid the understanding of the reader for the man, his daughter, their age or their church.
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