Monday, February 6, 2017

Galileo's Daughter -- January 2017

2 hour Nova based on book
Not available for streaming here, but there is a transcript of the program
DVD available from PLS.
Galileo’s place in science


Nice bio
I often think this was the book I was born to write. I felt a bond with the title character, though she was a Catholic nun living in Tuscany in the early sixteenth century, and I was raised Jewish in the Bronx in the mid-twentieth. From my first encounter with Suor Maria Celeste (Virginia Galilei), reading the letter in which she implored her father for help fixing the convent clock, I was enthralled by her prose style, her humor, and her moxie.
The realization that Galileo had fathered two nuns made me question everything I’d been taught about him in school. What if he did everything he did as a believing Catholic? I wondered. Isn’t that a much more nuanced, interesting story? And how would his daughter nuns have reacted to his unorthodox notions about the heavens? To his trial for heresy by the Roman Inquisition?
Finding the answers to those questions occupied me for five very happy years. I made four trips to Italy to read the original handwritten letters, held in Florence, and visit every place that Galileo and his children had lived. See this travel piece I wrote for the Sunday Times
Ironically, Galileo’s definition of the relationship between science and religion dovetails with the Church’s current official stance.
You may also be interested in Letters to Father.
============================================

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 thirteen until her death. Unable to include all my translations in the text, I gave the full set to The Galileo Project.
It soon became apparent, however, that the people who most wanted to read all the letters did not want to read them on-line. The compromise was Letters to Father, which presented the original Italian with English translation 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.

OTHER EDITIONS

British edition of the bi-lingual original, with a shortened title, To Father, and a different cover.
Locations
Library
Where is it:
Palo Alto Public Library
Mitchell Park - Adult - Non-Fiction
520.92 GALILEI
AVAILABLE
Santa Clara University
University Library Main Stacks, Lower Level
QB36.G2 A4 2003
AVAILABLE
Univ of Nevada Las Vegas
UNLV Book Stacks
QB36.G213 A4 2003
AVAILABLE
Locations
Library
Where is it:
Berkeley Public
Central Library
816 G133L
AVAILABLE
Contra Costa County Public Library
biog
B GALILEI
AVAILABLE
Contra Costa County Public Library
phl
B GALILEI
AVAILABLE
CSU East Bay
Book Stacks
QB36.G2 A4 2001
AVAILABLE
Mountain View Public
Adult Non-Fiction - 2nd Floor
520.92 GALILEI
AVAILABLE
Napa Valley College
Napa Valley College
920.92 GALILEI
AVAILABLE
Sacramento Public
Central Library
520.92 G1582L 2001
AVAILABLE
San Francisco Public
MAIN - 3rd Floor
B G133L2
AVAILABLE
Santa Clara City Public
Central
520 G15
AVAILABLE
Sonoma State Univ
3rd FLOOR STACKS
QB36.G2 A4 2001
AVAILABLE
Univ of Nevada Las Vegas
UNLV Book Stacks
QB36.G2 A4 2001
AVAILABLE
Yolo County Library
Davis NonFiction
B GALILEI
AVAILABLE
========================
Dava Sobel
New Statesman. 140.5073 (Oct. 3, 2011): p55. From Literature Resource Center.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 New Statesman, Ltd.
Full Text:
Before you began writing books, you worked as a science journalist. What did that involve?
In the early 1970s, I worked for Cornell University -1 was the science writer in its news bureau. I had responsibility for reporting on any kind of research. It was a wonderful job.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What was the relationship like between reporters and practising scientists?
At the university, it was very cordial -I had to show them everything. I was the only science writer there. They wanted their work to be written about. There was an idea that it would help them get more grant money if they could show there'd been newspaper or magazine interest.
Later, when I worked for the New York Times, only one person ever refused me an interview. Mostly, people would drop whatever they were doing if there was a chance of being interviewed by the Times.
Do you miss the daily grind of journalism?
No. I much prefer the chance to do things in depth. And not to be in such a rush. I find that I've gotten slower. To go to interview someone in the morning and then come back and write the article in the afternoon -I can hardly imagine I ever did that, though I used to do it all the time.
Your life changed with the publication, in 1995, of Longitude--about John Harrison, who invented the marine chronometer. How did that book come about?
It was originally a magazine article but my editor at Walker & Company took a risk on it. It was a big gamble for the company -it was a family-run business at that time.
Although my advance was very small, because they knew that they were doing something new and unusual, they stretched themselves. They hired an outside designer to make the book very beautiful; then they printed maybe 1,500 advance reading copies and gave them away at the booksellers' convention. And people knew that the company could not really afford to do something like that.
Your new book, A More Perfect Heaven, is about the relationship between Copernicus and a mathematician named Georg Joachim Rheticus. Is it important for you always to have a relationship at the centre of the story?
That certainly helps. In Harrison's story, you've got his relationship with the Board of Longitude, his fight with the astronomer royal, and so on.
I found that my book The Planets did not resonate with as large a public, and I'm sure that part of the reason was that there was no central character who could be followed. People seem to like stories about people.
You originally decided to write Copernicus's story as a play. Why?
The part of the story that interested me was the interaction between two people who were very different from each other--so it immediately suggested a dramatic tension. And the historical record is very thin, compared to that of someone like Galileo. So I thought it would be burdensome constantly to be weighing possibilities and not to be able to say for certain that this happened or that happened.
Would you say that Copernicus was the first modern scientist?
I really don't think that he was a modern scientist. He was trying to rectify ancient science. When he began, he had no intention of doing anything quite so revolutionary [as setting out his heliocentric theory].

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Brooklyn; a Novel -- February 2017

Images of Brooklyn 1950s
==================

 From Jane N.
Here is a link to an article I mentioned at Book Club on Monday.  It is about a reporter who found a photo album sitting on top of a pile of trash on a Brooklyn street and her efforts to find its owners.  It’s just a nice story, and I said that I would forward it to you.


This is a marvelous story that Jane has forwarded ...

Begin forwarded message:



Love and Black Lives, in Pictures Found on a Brooklyn Street

BY ANNIE CORREAL
A discarded photo album reveals a rich history of black lives, from the segregated South to Harlem dance halls to a pretty block in Crown Heights.
Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://nyti.ms/2jEfnNe 
=============

From Time:

Brooklyn and the True History of Irish Immigrants in 1950s New York City

Nov 04, 2015
As the star of the new movie Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan is tasked with portraying an Irish immigrant in 1950s New York City as a singular woman in a unique situation. But transatlantic love triangles aside, the experiences of the fictional Eilis Lacey would have been as common as Irish pubs are in today's Midtown Manhattan.
In the novel on which the movie is based, a best-seller by Colm Tóibín, Eilis moves from small-town Ireland, where she struggles to find work, to Brooklyn. A priest facilitates the move, finds her a job at an Italian-run department store and lodging in an Irish women's boarding house, and sets her up to take night classes in bookkeeping. Such a trajectory would have been typical for an Irish woman moving to New York at the time—but to fully understand Eilis's '50s experience, it's necessary to back up to the first boom of Irish immigration to America, in the 1840s.
When the potato famine sent droves of immigrants to America, New York City saw the beginning of a new immigrant infrastructure in which the Irish would eventually dominate powerful unions, civil service jobs and Catholic institutions in the city. Given their firm hold on construction work during a critical period of growth in Manhattan, "Bono of U2 exaggerated only slightly when he said the Irish built New York," says Stephen Petrus, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the New York Historical Society. While the Great Depression and World War II had decreased the rate of Irish immigration, newcomers to the city in 1950 would still find vibrant Irish enclaves with steady jobs available, an Irish mayor in William O'Dwyer and an Irish-American Cardinal in Francis Spellman, who was "highly influential, not just in religion, but in politics," Petrus says.
Meanwhile, economic conditions in Ireland were a different situation. As Irish-American historian and novelist Peter Quinn explains, "The country wasn’t in the Second World War, it had been kind of cut off from the rest of the world, and it wasn’t part of the Marshall Plan. So it was still a very rural country." The economy was at a standstill, while the U.S. was booming. Some 50,000 immigrants left Ireland for America in the '50s, about a quarter of them settling in New York.
And, within that community, women played an important role. During the 19th century, the wave of Irish was "the only immigration where there were a majority of women," Quinn says. And, thanks to a culture that supported nuns and teachers, those women were often able to delay marriage and look for jobs. By the mid 20th century, many Irish women—who also benefited from the ability to speak English—were working in supermarkets, utility companies, restaurants and, like Eilis, department stores. The fact that Eilis finds her job through her priest is also typical. "[The Catholic Church] was an employment agency. It was the great transatlantic organization," Quinn says. "If you came from Ireland, everything seemed different, but the church didn’t. It was a comfort that way, and it was a connection."
It's fitting, then, that Eilis meets her love interest, the Italian-American Tony, at a parish dance. These were tremendously popular social events where women could meet men while under the protective supervision of their priest. No alcohol would have been on offer, which added another layer of safety. And it's not at all strange that Eilis would strike up with an Italian-American man rather than a fellow Celt. "When people talked about intermarriage in the ‘50s, they weren’t talking about black-white, they were talking about Irish-Italian," Quinn says.
But there is one place where Eilis' story departs from the historic norm, and it's the crux of the plot: her trip home to Ireland and the possibility that the homesick protagonist might move back permanently. Though many immigrants would send money home to relatives who had stayed Ireland, Quinn says, "it was rare for Irish immigrants to go back to live." Even so, though Tóibín's protagonist is fictional, the heartache and growing pains experienced by so many women with stories like hers would have been unmistakably real.
From Communities Digital news

1950’s Brooklyn: America’s starting point that now lives in memories
by Allan C. Brownfeld - Jan 24, 2016
0 3059
The American story will never be finished, but it does have a beginning - and for many families that was Brooklyn, highlighted in a new book and movie


WASHINGTON, January 23, 2016 – In his book, and the movie, “Brooklyn,” Irish author Colm Toibin has told a story which brings life to an America now long gone.
It is the story of a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who lives in a small Irish town with her mother and sister. It is 1951 and Eilis is leaving for America, not in any spirit of rebellion, but because she was unable to find work in Ireland and a local priest who had himself relocated to New York helps her to find employment in a Brooklyn department store.
Once in Brooklyn, she takes night classes at Brooklyn College in bookkeeping. Her teacher is a survivor of the Holocaust. She meets and falls in love with a young Italian-American plumber named Tony. Tony, being a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan, Eilis learns about baseball.


In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in the major leagues, and in Brooklyn, he and the Dodgers were constant subjects of discussion.
To understand America, Brooklyn is a very good place to begin. Movies made during World War II always seemed to include one young man from Brooklyn, together with one from the South, in every military unit.
What could be more American?
In coming to Brooklyn, the fictional Eilis Lacey followed a long line of Irish immigrants to New York, propelled to the New World when the potato famine in the mid-19th century sent droves of immigrants to America.  New York City saw the beginning of a new immigrant culture in which the Irish would eventually dominate powerful unions, civil service jobs and Catholic institutions


Newcomers in the 1950s would find a vibrant Irish community, an Irish mayor in William O’Dwyer and an Irish-American Cardinal in Francis Spellman, who was as influential in politics as in religion.
Some 50,000 immigrants left Ireland for America in the 1950s, about a quarter settling in New York. Referring to Colm Toibin’s novel, Irish-American historian and novelist Peter Quinn says that,
“When people talked about intermarriage in the ’50s, they weren’t talking about black-white, they were talking about Irish-Italian.”
A look at Brooklyn’s history in instructive. It was first settled by the Dutch in 1646 and called “Breuckelen.” In 1664, the Dutch colony of New Netherlands surrendered to England and was renamed New York. Brooklyn remained an independent city until 1898 when it became one of the five boroughs of the reorganized City of New York.
This writer grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, just as the fictional Eilis Lacey was arriving. My family lived on street in which the residents of each house were of a different ethnic background and religion. My friends as a child were Irish and Italian, Polish and German, and I am sure many other origins.
On the newsstand several blocks away, in addition to The New York Times and the Daily News, newspapers in a myriad of languages were on sale, among them the Italian Il Progresso, the Yiddish Forward, the Irish Echo, in Gaelic, and a host of others.
There was a Catholic Church three blocks away and a Lutheran Church that conducted services in German, as well as a synagogue. Brooklyn was known as the “city of churches.”
The neighborhood high school, Erasmus Hall, was established as a private academy in 1786. A subscription was initiated for the funding of a secondary school. Contributors included Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Aaron Burr. The Dutch Reformed Church donated a three acre lot for the new school. It was the second high school to be established in the country.
It remained a private school until 1896 when it was deeded to the City of Brooklyn and became Erasmus Hall High School.
The notable alumni of Erasmus Hall would fill many pages. Consider a few: Joseph Barbera, cartoonist, creator of “Tom and Jerry”; Artist Elaine M. Fried deKooning; Art historian Arthur M. Sackler; Nobel Prize winning scientist Dr. Barbara McClintock; opera singer Beverly Sills; Hollywood stars Shirley Booth, John Forsythe, Eli Wallach and Susan Hayward; chess champion Bobby Fisher; singers Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond; writers Bernard Malamud and Mickey Spillane.
In my senior year, Erasmus Hall was named one of the ten best high schools in the country.
In Brooklyn in the 1950s, people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds thought of themselves as quite different, though all felt thoroughly and completely American. The public schools instilled patriotism and a common national identity. If the older generation of that era were alive today they would marvel at the fact that the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern European Jews, the Germans, the Scandinavians and others are now described in the U.S. Census as simply “white.”
They have been busy marrying one another and blurring the lines of division. And now Brooklyn is home to a new wave of immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, China and Korea.
The American story is never finished.
Whether we are now prepared to integrate an ever more diverse immigrant group into our society is less than clear. Remembering the way American public schools once served to bring children of immigrants into the mainstream, Fotine Z. Nicholas, who taught for 30 years in New York City schools, writes:
“I recall with nostalgia the way things used to be. At P.S. 82 in Manhattan, 90 per cent of the students had European-born parents. Our teachers were mostly of Irish origin, and they tried hard to homogenize us. We might refer to ourselves as Czech or Hungarian or Greek but we developed a sense of pride in being American….There were two unifying factors: the attitude of our teachers and the English language…After we started school, we spoke only English to our siblings, our classmates and our friends. We studied and wrote in English, we played in English, we thought in English.”
America, we often forget, is more than simply another country. Visiting New Amsterdam in 1643, French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was surprised to discover that 18 languages were spoken in this town of 8,000 people. In his Letters From an American Farmer, J.Hector Crevecoeur wrote in 1782:
“Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
The author Mario Puzo notes that,
“What has happened here has never happened in any other country in any other time. The poor who had been poor for centuries…whose children had inherited their poverty, their illiteracy, their hopelessness, achieved some economic dignity and freedom. You didn’t get it for nothing, you had to pay a price in tears, in suffering, why not? And some even became artists.”
As a young man growing up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Puzo was asked by his mother, an Italian immigrant, what he wanted to be when he grew up. When he said he wanted to be a writer, she responded that, “For a thousand years in Italy no one in our family was even able to read.”
But in America, everything was possible—in a single generation.
In 1866, Lord Acton, the British Liberal Party leader, said that America was becoming the “distant magnet.” Apart from the “millions who have crossed the ocean, who should reckon the millions whose hearts and hopes are in the United States, to whom the rising sun is in the West?”
Brooklyn in the 1950s is brought to life by Colm Toibin in his book and in the movie adaptation. It is a place which was instrumental in creating the America we have today. Those who would understand our complex society would do well to recall the values which in 1950s Brooklyn forged an American identity, not only for Eilis Lacey and her husband Tony, but for an untold number of men and women.
America was being made in 1950s Brooklyn and it is still being made there today, and in countless other places throughout the country.

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