Galileo: A Life

Vividly depicting the brilliant scientist and dramatically portraying the turbulence and richness of the era in which he lived, a chronicle of Galileo's career focuses on his invention of the telescope, which forced a dangerous confrontation with the Inquisition.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) may seem an unlikely subject for Reston, who has previously chronicled Jim Jones, John Connally and the clash of baseball's Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti. But Galileo, like Reston's present-day subjects, was at once a man deeply imbedded in and polarized by his milieu and its surrounding force fields. Reston delineates the personal and institutional storms that Galileo endured and seemed unerringly to seek out. He collided with church authorities in Rome, with his peers and a succession of patrons. Reston scants both science and 17th-century theology in setting the stage for the general reader, but he recreates the era with immediacy by mining Galileo's journals and letters for dialogue. The use of present tense gives the characters a magnified, flesh-and-blood presence that neatly balances with the Galileo legend. Reston suggests that the spirit of Galileo's age still lives today in the Vatican. Newbridge Book Club alternate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This readable biography of the 17th-century scientist and mathematician is long on politics and personality and short on science and math. Reston (Collision at Home plate, 1991) divides Galileo's life in three. Since there is no wealth of information on the developmental years and early career, they are handled quickly. Galileo's rise is given in greater detail, especially his search for patronage, his intense defense of his work in the face of religious and intellectual resistance, and his ridiculing counterattacks on plagiarists and intellectual thieves. Reston assumes we know Galileo's achievements in the sciences and so spends little time on them. Instead, he builds the biography around two aspects of Galileo's character. The first is his political instincts, which on the one hand led to a fawning attitude to secular and ecclesiastical patrons, and on the other to a powerful use of his pen in attacking intellectual opponents without regard to political implications. The second trait Reston focuses on is Galileo's intellectual self-assurance, which kept him from understanding the anti-intellectual resistance to his work. These political implications come back to haunt Galileo, as the third part of the book shows in chronicling the scientist's fall. Reston devotes the major portion of his book to Galileo's trials. He creates a well-rounded portrait, convincing the reader to appreciate Galileo's mood swings, his intellectual arrogance, and his final capitulation as behavior to be expected from the man portrayed. He is as good exploring the politics of Counter- Reformation Italy and the anti-intellectualism of the conservative elements of the Church, and weaker on why and how Galileo's work was potentially heretical. He successfully portrays Galileo's world, with its colorful group of Renaissance Italians. Readily accessible, the book is an interesting character study and political biography of the great scientist. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

We've all heard about him, but how many of us have read much about the great Galileo? Reston here offers a popular biography that takes in the sweep of Renaissance Italy.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reston's previous books have spotlighted military or cult leaders, politicians, or sports figures. So Galileo is a departure, but because science and its collision with theology in the early seventeenth century is new territory for Reston, he is able to transform it into fresh terrain for all his readers, even those most familiar with Galileo's tragic tale of genius and persecution. Reston brings this star-gazing, intuitively intelligent, original, articulate, witty, theatrical, self-promoting, cash-poor, and nearly inexhaustible Italian Catholic to life in an involving and, yes, suspenseful narrative. Acquaintance with the facts does nothing to diminish the drama, and Reston's zealous research, judicious use of excerpts from letters, poems, and church documents, vivid descriptions, and frank indignation over the church's appalling treatment of his hero enliven every page. We feel the shock and wonder Galileo felt when he looked through his first perfected telescope and saw the mountains and craters of the Moon, the dance of the moons of Jupiter, and the surprising movements of sunspots--dangerous but undeniable observations that stood in sharp contrast to the Vatican's sanctioned view of the universe. We also empathize with this brilliant man as he pesters those in power for university appointments, money, and permission to publish his world-altering texts. Reston has composed vigorous portraits of Galileo's loyal supporters and vicious enemies while illuminating the political turmoil of his times. Reston also makes clear his dissatisfaction with the Vatican's 1992 "formal recognition of error" in its handling of Galileo's inquisition: it's just too little, too late. Donna Seaman