THE OTHER END OF THE TELESCOPE

In 1641, old and blind and under house arrest for suspicion of heresy, Galileo Galilei wrote to his most beloved student: "I spend my fruitless days which are so long because of my continuous inactivity and yet so brief compared with all the months and years which have passed; I am left with no other comfort than the memory of the sweetness of former friendships."

Part of Galileo's grief was the loss of his illegitimate daughter Suor Maria Celeste, at the age of 33. After her death, he wrote to a family friend that he felt "immense sadness and melancholy," had lost his appetite and continually heard his daughter calling to him. This was the daughter who, from her own prison within a convent since her 13th birthday, had lovingly bleached her father's collars. At times, she had copied over his correspondence, or made his favorite confections from the lemons and chartreuse citrons he sent her from his garden. The father, in turn, delivered to his daughter special spinach dishes that he cooked himself. He gave her a warm quilt to replace the one she had given to her younger sister. He improved her windows by refitting the frames with newly waxed linens.

Such personal expressions of devotion and character, often in the small details of everyday life, form the literary motif of Dava Sobel's beautifully written new book. Sobel is a master storyteller. Her elegant previous book, "Longitude," described the search for accurate clocks to locate positions at sea. Here, she turns her talent to creating an exceptionally human narrative of the physicist whose achievements and thought have been equaled only by Newton and Einstein. Galileo began modern science as we know it. Yet what the great thinkers of this world struggle with intellectually is often matched by the inner struggles of their hearts.

There are dozens of books about Galileo and his science. This one offers no new biographical facts or scientific discussions; furthermore, a number of his daughter's letters have been previously published in English and are well known to scholars. What Sobel has done, with her choice of excerpts and her strong sense of story, is bring a great scientist to life. Reading "Galileo's Daughter," we hear Galileo's voice, we sense his pain and share his excitement, and once again we marvel at how the human mind, and heart, can lift so much.

- Alan Lightman, for The New York Times Book Review

WHEN THE EARTH MOVED

How different was Galileo's time from our own? Dava Sobel spends a whole book counting the ways. As she demonstrated so delightfully with her first book, Longitude, Sobel loves the byways and oddities of history- the discovery of longitude was pulled off by an 18th-century clockmaker. In Galileo's Daughter, a briskly written history that reads like a novel, she plunges into a 17th-century world where gravity had not been discovered, thermometers had not been invented and women could be consigned to convent life simply because they weren't marriageable. Retelling the story of Galileo's famous battle with the Inquisition over geocentricism, she brings it to life by concentrating on the everyday- his professional feuds, his own sincere religious beliefs and- most important- his intense relationship with his eldest daughter, a cloistered nun. The result is no textbook-sterile debate between science and religion over whether the sun revolved around a fixed Earth but an epic battle over our place in the cosmos.

Counterbalancing Galileo's story with Maria Celeste's, Sobel tells not just their story but the story of their times.

-Malcolm Jones, for Newsweek

LOOKING TO HEAVEN, GAZING AT THE STARS

Forming the core of Galileo's Daughter, Maria Celeste's 124 surviving letters to her father (whose responses were likely destroyed by an abbess wary of the Inquisition) brim with concern for the health of [Galileo's] body and soul. They also give us glimpses of everyday life in early 17th-century Italy, the backdrop for a drama of conflict and discovery- the discovery of Jupiter's moons, of the law of falling bodies and, most important, of an empirical and mathematical scientific method that would replace the verbal abstractions of "natural philosophy."

Ms. Sobel draws on these letters to make refreshing juxtapositions of the mundane and extraordinary. For instance, while Galileo waits to face his inquisitors in Rome, Maria Celeste reports to him on the prices his oranges are fetching at market. Being human, he must have been worried about both, if not to the same degree.

As in her previous book, Longitude (1995), [Sobel] here shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas on such subjects as hydraulics and planetary motion are pithy, vivid, and intelligible.

- Francis X. Rocca, for The Wall Street Journal

COSMIC LOVE BRINGS FATHER OF SCIENCE
INTO TELESCOPIC FOCUS

Despite its title, Galileo's Daughter is mostly about Galileo, the father of modern science, who tried to tread "a dangerous path between the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic and the heaves he revealed through his telescope."

To Sobel (and to Galileo himself), the dispute with church officials, who got to approve and censor all books, was never as simple as it often is portrayed, an either/or kind of collision between science and religion.

The book's beauty grows out of Maria Celeste's letters, so revealing of everyday life in 17th century Italy. She struggles to find money for the convent and to manage her family's farm. She worries about ecclesiastical politics and her father's enemies and health while the bubonic plague ravages Europe.

Life goes on, even when your father is under house arrest for heresy, his books banned: "I also want to know," she writes, "how much straw to buy for the little mule, because La Pietra fears she will die of hunger, and the fodder is not good enough for her, as she is a most original animal."

Sobel is a most original writer, with a reverence for history and storytelling.

- Bob Minzesheimer, for USA Today

A REVEALING PICTURE OF GALILEO'S LIFE

History comes alive as Sobel alternates the narrative on scientific discovery with lively descriptions of the society in which they were set. This combination leads to a full understanding of the context of Galileo's life, one in which politics strongly affected public acceptance of his theories.

Galileo's Daughter is a remarkable work for the beauty of the writing and the clarity of the time and relationships it creates. Sobel pays close attention to fine detail, resulting in a work that feels real.

Reading Sobel's depiction of Galileo's life, one is struck by the fact that some conflicts- freedom of thought and speech, the clash of new discoveries against established thought, the uneasy relationship between science and religion- are truly timeless.

- Robin Vidimos, for The Denver Post

THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER

Like her earlier book, Longitude, which detailed the tumultuous, deadly search for a means to determine one's location at sea, Sobel seamlessly recounts history as wonderful narrative filled with outsized characters all marching toward a booming climax.

The climax here is Galileo's trial at the Vatican, which Sobel deftly offers with rare insights obviously culled from a lot of research... Though Galileo avoided the worst of possible fates he did spend the remainder of his life essentially under house arrest, forbidden to discuss Copernican theory and other matters of science with his visitors.

Consequently, Galileo fretted that his life's work and legacy were ruined, that his scientific labors had fallen victim to his faith. Neither, of course, happened. Galileo never forsook his faith. He died a devout Catholic, unable to understand why his church and his science could not find common ground.

- Scott LaFee, for The San Diego Union Tribune