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Heaven on Earth, by LS Fauber
May. 19th, 2024 08:10 pmThis is a book about some of the main characters in the scientific revolution era--Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo--and their social circles/connections. Copernicus predates the others and didn't have much contact with any of them. Likewise, Brahe and Galileo didn't overlap. Brahe and Kepler were mentor and protege and worked closely together, and Kepler and Galileo were pen pals, so that counts, but otherwise, the "social connections" theme is kind of limited.
The unimpressed reviews on [large review aggregator site] are pretty accurate. One, the aforementioned issue with "they didn't really all know each other." Two, the proportions dedicated to each person are kind of skewed. The author seems to have been interested primarily in Galileo, and secondarily, in Brahe. Really, in Brahe's sister, Sophia, who was an intelligent and hard-working astrologer in her own right. (Tycho considered publishing some of her writings with the disclaimer "I tried to talk her out of it because astrology is kind of laborious for women's brains, but she wasn't going to listen to me." Good guy Brahe supports women in STEM!) So, "the life and times of Galileo and his circle" is certainly enough material for a book in its own right, but it just feels weird to be like "fast forward through Copernicus so we can get to the good stuff."
In general, Fauber is too much in love with the sound of her own voice and literary allusions. There is a lot of material relegated to the footnotes, and a lot of it is stuff like "heehee I couldn't resist a quote from T.S. Eliot here" and...like...you should have resisted. (One of the things that got brought up in history of science class is that as a field of history, it's still very young; a lot of the previous "history" stuff was written by scientists, not necessarily historians. But in this case, the pendulum has swung too far over to the literature people.)
She also had a lot of fun, maybe too much fun, translating/paraphrasing Latin somewhat liberally and showing it off. For instance, on a couple occasions, Galileo published a gibberish anagram claiming priority for his discoveries, so everybody could try to unscramble the letters and guess (a somewhat poetic phrasing of) his result, but only he knew the actual intended solution. Kepler kept trying and failing to solve the anagram. Now, I don't read Latin, so even if I could see the Latin phrases and go "oh, look, same letters, it's an anagram," I would need a translation of both the guesses and the actual discoveries. That's the kind of handholding I want authors to do for me. But instead, Fauber tries to reproduce both (very verbose and over-the-top-flowery) versions in English only, and relegates the actual anagrams to the footnotes! Who is the target audience here?
Then there's a long tangent about Kepler's computations, and I guess what happened is that the editor said "too long, too much math, either cut it shorter or move it to an appendix" and Fauber said "okay, I will cut it shorter and move it to an appendix," so the appendix is just like a longer version of the abridged section, featuring several paragraphs copy-and-pasted, with corresponding exhaustive footnotes.
"I do not mean to construct a world of hysterical suicidal gay nuns" <- one of the asides that got relegated to the footnotes. Feels like a classic case of "this is raising a lot of questions already answered by the footnote."
Anyway, as someone who is much more sympathetic to Kepler than Fauber appears to be, a more engaging book I would recommend that touches on some of the same ground is "The Grapes of Math" by Alex Bellos. The other reviews also pointed to Dava Sobel ("Galileo's Daughter,") which, ditto.
Edit to add: I'd forgotten/hadn't known that some of the characters in Galileo's "Dialogues" were named after his RL friends. I understand that you don't want to name the ignorant Ptolemaic character after anyone you know and like, but I feel like if it were me, I would come up with a better name for that character than "Simplicius."
The unimpressed reviews on [large review aggregator site] are pretty accurate. One, the aforementioned issue with "they didn't really all know each other." Two, the proportions dedicated to each person are kind of skewed. The author seems to have been interested primarily in Galileo, and secondarily, in Brahe. Really, in Brahe's sister, Sophia, who was an intelligent and hard-working astrologer in her own right. (Tycho considered publishing some of her writings with the disclaimer "I tried to talk her out of it because astrology is kind of laborious for women's brains, but she wasn't going to listen to me." Good guy Brahe supports women in STEM!) So, "the life and times of Galileo and his circle" is certainly enough material for a book in its own right, but it just feels weird to be like "fast forward through Copernicus so we can get to the good stuff."
In general, Fauber is too much in love with the sound of her own voice and literary allusions. There is a lot of material relegated to the footnotes, and a lot of it is stuff like "heehee I couldn't resist a quote from T.S. Eliot here" and...like...you should have resisted. (One of the things that got brought up in history of science class is that as a field of history, it's still very young; a lot of the previous "history" stuff was written by scientists, not necessarily historians. But in this case, the pendulum has swung too far over to the literature people.)
She also had a lot of fun, maybe too much fun, translating/paraphrasing Latin somewhat liberally and showing it off. For instance, on a couple occasions, Galileo published a gibberish anagram claiming priority for his discoveries, so everybody could try to unscramble the letters and guess (a somewhat poetic phrasing of) his result, but only he knew the actual intended solution. Kepler kept trying and failing to solve the anagram. Now, I don't read Latin, so even if I could see the Latin phrases and go "oh, look, same letters, it's an anagram," I would need a translation of both the guesses and the actual discoveries. That's the kind of handholding I want authors to do for me. But instead, Fauber tries to reproduce both (very verbose and over-the-top-flowery) versions in English only, and relegates the actual anagrams to the footnotes! Who is the target audience here?
Then there's a long tangent about Kepler's computations, and I guess what happened is that the editor said "too long, too much math, either cut it shorter or move it to an appendix" and Fauber said "okay, I will cut it shorter and move it to an appendix," so the appendix is just like a longer version of the abridged section, featuring several paragraphs copy-and-pasted, with corresponding exhaustive footnotes.
"I do not mean to construct a world of hysterical suicidal gay nuns" <- one of the asides that got relegated to the footnotes. Feels like a classic case of "this is raising a lot of questions already answered by the footnote."
Anyway, as someone who is much more sympathetic to Kepler than Fauber appears to be, a more engaging book I would recommend that touches on some of the same ground is "The Grapes of Math" by Alex Bellos. The other reviews also pointed to Dava Sobel ("Galileo's Daughter,") which, ditto.
Edit to add: I'd forgotten/hadn't known that some of the characters in Galileo's "Dialogues" were named after his RL friends. I understand that you don't want to name the ignorant Ptolemaic character after anyone you know and like, but I feel like if it were me, I would come up with a better name for that character than "Simplicius."
