Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love – Dava Sobel

Condition : Good.
Fourth Estate, 1999, Hardback with removable protective plastic wrap – Biographical- 429pp. ISBN 9781857028614.

Filled with human drama and scientific adventure, “Galileo’s Daughter” is an unforgettable story.

The story of the relationship between Galileo and his illegitimate daughter, Virginia. As a nun, she wrote 120 letters to her father, from 1623 to her death from exposure and malnutrition ten years later.

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.

” 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”

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