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GALILEO'S DAUGHTER follows Dava Sobel's enormously successful LONGITUDE. Both are nonfiction books that have been praised, in part, for prose that flows as easily as if the book were a novel. I can't quite agree that LONGITUDE "flowed"; for me that was a dense but rewarding reading experience. GALILEO'S DAUGHTER is less dense, therefore an easier read, but in my opinion, anyone who frequently reads fiction should not start this book expecting it to be even remotely like reading a novel. What it is, is an outstanding example of non-fiction at its most accessible. Ms. Sobel is a very learned woman, obviously. She says in her own introduction that she herself, translated the daughter's letters from the original Italian herself. Suor Maria Celeste (her name calls to mind the stars and planets that became her father's obsession) is a very graceful letter writer. I expect most readers know the basic, biographical story of GALILEO'S DAUGHTER, but for those who don't, I'll summarize: Galileo Galilei was a teacher, a writer, and an enthusiastic -- more than that, passionate -- speaker and debater. He invented the type of telescope that is still in use today, and is best known for using that telescope to confirm the Copernican theory that the earth and all the planets move around the sun. Galileo lived in Italy at the turn of the 16th to the 17th Century. This was a time when the Western World was moving from the Renaissance into the so-called Age of Reason, and Galileo was a harbinger. Harbingers are seldom welcomed by the conservative element of any society ... and just to make things worse for a devout man like Galileo, the "conservative element" of Italian society at that time was the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo never married, but he had three children who lived with him, two daughters and a son. Both daughters were sent to live at the Convent of the Poor Clares (women's equivalent of the Franciscans -- please excuse an oversimplification) when they were barely in their teens. Both chose to stay and became professed nuns. The older one, S(uor) Maria Celeste, is the one who writes so gracefully, and sometimes charmingly, to her father. He saved all her letters. She, unfortunately, could not save his because of the rules of her religious order. Dava Sobel writes far more clearly and accessibly than most historians. She tells the complex facts of the life of this great genius, Galileo, beginning from his own early education all the way through his exceptionally long life for a man of those times: he died at age 78. The unfolding of Galileo's life story comprises most of the text, with relatively few pages devoted to S. Maria Celeste's letters. Or so it seemed to me -- the letters themselves were so highly praised by reviewers when this book first came out, I suppose my expectations may have been built up too high. At the end of GALILEO'S DAUGHTER there's much useful information, such as a calendar that begins some time before Galileo's birth and continues after his death, very useful for placing events into a wider historical context; an annotated bibliiography; and a thorough index that allows you, after finishing the book, to easily return to parts you want to read again. GALILEO'S DAUGHTER is a book to immerse yourself in for long stretches at a time. The greatest enjoyment I had was such immersion, until I began to feel as if I too lived during this very complex, challenging, and exciting period of history. A great genius was made human ... in both heartbreaking and impressive ways. I felt I knew Galileo, and I cried at his treatment by the Inquisition, and again at his death. The many portraits of Galileo at different ages, interspersed throughout the text, aided the development of this feeling. I wished a documented portrait of S. Maria Celeste might have been found and included, so that I could have a visual sense of her, too. [There is one supposedly of her, but the identity of the nun in that portrait has not been confirmed, which in a way is worse than not having one at all.] Any frequent reader of fiction, who wants a change and is ready to dip into enjoyable work of nonfiction, could do far worse than to read GALILEO'S DAUGHTER.
Reviewed by Ava D. Day, March 2002
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