Galileo Galilei was the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. His telescopes allowed him to reveal the heavens and enforce the astounding argument that the earth moves around the sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest. Galileo's oldest child was thirteen when he placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her support was her father's greatest source of strength. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. GALILEO'S DAUGHTER dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during an era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was overturned. With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Latitude, GALILEO'S DAUGHTER is an unforgettable story.
Despite its title, this is less the story of Galileo's eldest daughter, Sister Marie Celeste, and more the story of the scientist himself and his clashes with the Church over his heretical belief that the earth moves around the sun. George Guidall approaches this lengthy story, with its frequent excerpting of letters from daughter to father, with the marathon runner's judicious pace. He doesn't exactly hurry, but he keeps things moving, always managing to sound absorbed by the material and (when the need arises) nicely Italian in his pronunciation. Guidall's pleasant voice has an old-fashioned air, which suits this material, with its excursions into the sometimes ornate and excessively polite language of the letters, quite well. J.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine
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