By Dava Sobel

I’ve long been entranced by space, ever since I was a little kid. There occured many occasions, perhaps before I hit double figures, where my child’s mind would try to get my head around the fact that before there was nothing … there was something.

It was phenomenal to me to envisage that way back when, before people, before the things from which people spawned, before ooze, before rocks and desert, when there was nothing at all … there was something.

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By Dava Sobel

I was looking for a book on Galileo and found out that Dava Sobel had written one. Well, this had me expecting great things, because I read her brilliant book on longitude a couple of years ago.

This book is a little bit different to standard fare though. Galileo had two daughters. Both were born out of wedlock, so he sent them to a convent. One of them, the elder, Virginia, went by the convent name Suor Maria Celeste, and wrote frequent letters to her father throughout their lives, sometimes as many as two a week.

The author intersperses her narrative with letters from Maria Celeste throughout the book.

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