| The Planets |
| The Planets uses astrology, mythology, science fiction, music, and poetry to link today's scientific exploration of the Solar System with planetary allusions in popular culture. It celebrates Earth and her nearest neighbors at this unique moment in history, when the old familiar family of nine planets acknowledges the nearly two hundred newly discovered planets orbiting stars beyond the Sun. Entertainment Weekly described The Planets as "an incantatory serenade to the solar system." |
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| Galileo's Daughter |
| Galileo's Daughter revisits the life of the great Italian scientist through the eyes of his eldest daughter, a cloistered nun. Their loving relationship, traced through actual correspondence, overturns the myth of Galileo as an enemy of the Catholic church. Although his discoveries in astronomy made Galileo world famous, his writings brought him to trial before the Inquisition, after which he was forced to deny his own beliefs. Ironically, his definition of the relationship between science and religion has since become the Church's official position. The New York Times said, "Sobel is a master storyteller....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." |
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| Longitude |
| Longitude tells the life-and-death story behind the gridwork of lines that appear on every world map and globe. In the early days of sail, mariners had no accurate means of determining their position at sea. Indeed, the entire Age of Exploration was carried out without anyone's ever knowing where he was! Since ships lost track of their longitude as soon as they lost sight of land, innumerable tragedies befell navies and traders — until John Harrison, a self-educated clockmaker, solved the problem of longitude in the mid-eighteenth century and laid claim to the great Longitude Prize offered by Parliament. Newsweek called the book "Intricate and elegant," noting, "No novelist could improve on the elements of Dava Sobel's Longitude." |
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| The Illustrated Longitude |
| Roughly one-quarter of the many letters I received after the publication of Longitude complained that the book contained no pictures, maps or diagrams. This loudly expressed interest in illustrative material led to The Illustrated Longitude, published simultaneously in England and the United States in 1998, with 180 images selected and captioned by my co-author, William J. H. Andrewes. As organizer of the original "Longitude Symposium" at Harvard University in 1993, Andrewes is also the editor of The Quest for Longitude, which contains the complete text of all the technical papers delivered at that three-day event. |
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| Letters to Father |
| Galileo's Daughter quoted liberally from the 124 surviving letters that Suor Maria Celeste wrote to her famous father from the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, where she lived from age 13 until her death. I published my translations of the full set of letters on the web site of The Galileo Project. It soon became apparent, however, that the people who most wanted to read all the letters preferred to have them in book form. The result was Letters to Father, which presented the original Italian and the English translations on facing pages. Proceeds from the hardcover edition — a gorgeous, expensive volume, with real cloth covers and a ribbon bookmark — went to support the Poor Clares, the religious order to which both of Galileo's daughters belonged. Although the hardcover is out of print, Letters to Father is still available (English text only) as a Penguin Classic. |
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