Galileo’s Daughter

Author: Dava Sobel

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Inspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable letters of his daughter, which she has translated into English for the first time, Dava Sobel has written a book that brings Galileo to life as never before. A man who was compelled to explain the truths he discovered, he was a faithful Catholic devoted to family and, especially, to his daughter. Their voices and those of others who touched their lives, echo down the centuries through letters and writings, which Sobel masterfully weaves into her narrative, building towards the crescendo of history's most dramatic collision between science and religion. In the process, Dava Sobel illuminates an entire era, when the flamboyant Medici Gran Dukes became Galileo's patrons, when the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and prayer was the most effective medicine, when the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, and when one man fought, through his trial and betrayal by his former friend, Pope Urban VIII, to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope.