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by Matthew Minson (Author)
From the award-winning, best-selling author of Sun City, A Hilariously Addictive Story of Rebellion (2022 BIBA Award winner) and the Prepare to Defend Yourself series (Library Journal) comes the timely and inspiring true story of an intellectual superhero.
In 1632, astronomer, physicist and rebel polymath, Galileo Galilei, is dragged from his home by the Inquisition for proving the Copernican concept of heliocentrism. His real crime, however, is irreverence and a clever defiance of the superstitions of the Catholic Church. Told from the context of his trial preparations with long-time friend, Cardinal Bellarmine, and his Jesuit assistant Ferrero, Galileo's life story is revealed, and in the process, we are shown something new - an intellectual tragic hero. Despite the dangers facing him, Galileo cannot escape the compulsion of his own intelligence and nature to disavow what he has proven about the heavens. The question is, can his life be saved without sacrificing something even greater? To answer that question, they must examine his entire life. Starting with his precocious beginnings as the child of a musical virtuoso to his meteoric rise from failing medical student to innovative mathematical prodigy, the foundations of Galileo as most historians know him is revealed in a very human context. Never is that more apparent than when the focus shifts to the story of his great love, Marina Gamba. With her, the genius of Galileo might have been matched by happiness, but it was not to be. Thwarted by his own mother, Galileo and Marina are not allowed to marry. Faced with the potential ruin of his son and daughters due to illegitimacy, Galileo is forced to do the unthinkable. He must arrange for the marriage of Marina to another man. Appealing to his friend Bellarmine, his daughters are invested in the Order of the Poor Clares, a radical proto-feminist group of nuns, where his oldest daughter, Virginia, becomes the brilliant apothecary, Sister Maria Celeste, and ultimately his intellectual confederate. Declaring that he will dedicate himself to his only other love, Galileo becomes a master of mathematics and philosophy at the Lincean Academy, a fraternity of scholarship that merges science with art. There he turns a brilliant eye to the heavens and begins documenting and proving the concepts of Copernicus. He studies the tides, invents, and discovers laws of the universe that will someday be formalized by Newton. Unfortunately, his celebrity and genius generate envy from two lesser scholars, Cremonini and Colombe, who set out to assassinate him politically with the Church establishment. Galileo's only advocate it seems is the wealthy and ambitious Maffeo Barberini whose affection for Galileo seems slightly more than platonic. Eventually rising to become Pope Urban VIII, Barberini is manipulated to a jealous rage by the deceitful Cremonini and Colombe, and it is his judgment and sentence that appears to be the end of Galileo. Relegated by his persecutors to the presumed silence and isolation of house arrest, and prohibitions against further publication and social isolation from the world, his brilliant work gets out with the aid of Sister Maria Celeste. Soon the world is coming to Galileo with the likes of Elsevier, Campanella and the poet John Milton who is so inspired by their conversation that he leaves to pen his masterpiece, Paradise Lost. In the end, Galileo's story shows that while a human may be thwarted and even destroyed, the human spirit burns as indefatigably as the stars.
Number of Pages: 330
Dimensions: 0.69 x 9 x 6 IN
Publication Date: January 08, 2023
