Category: Dava Sobel

The Year 2023 in Books

Continuing with our year in review, Matt Lynn Digital invites you to look back at the last year in reviews of books, movies, music and television. We look at these with individual categories, one per day through Sunday. Today we share the twenty-six (26) book reviews offered by Matt Lynn Digital in 2023.

(The cover for the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin).

Our highest rated read for 2023 was The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Earning 4.75-stars on a scale of 1-to-5, the book, Rubin “set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.” The subject matter was offering suggestions for how best to engage the construction of creatively made content effectively.

(The cover for the book Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon).

Five books earned 4.5-stars from Matt Lynn Digital in 2023, with Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon earning the top billing. The proper means for reading Heavy: An American Memoir is with an open mind and an open heart while aiming for empathy and understanding. Other books earning 4.5-stars include 60 Seconds & You’re Hired! by Robin Ryan, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America by Wil Haygood, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins.

(The cover for the book Sea of Tranquility: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel).

Led by the Emily St. John Mandel book Sea of Tranquility: A Novel, three books read in 2023 earned 4.25-star ratings. The notion of experiencing a life moving through time and space on an emotional journey of self-discovery drew us to the St. John Mandel work. Other books also earning 4.25-stars were the extraordinary Dan Chaon book Sleepwalk and the Ernest Hemingway book To Have and Have Not.

(The cover for the book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers).

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as written by Carson McCullers tops a stable of six books to earn 4.0-stars. The central point of the book using a mute as the protagonist while sharing the semi-autobiographical character Mick Kelly as an exposition for the writer were appealing concepts for the work. Others to earn a similar 4.0-star rating included Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle.

(The cover for the book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel).

The Dava Sobel book The Glass Universe How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars leads a stable of eleven (11) books to earn 3.75-stars for books that we read in 2023. Learning the histories of women including Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin made this reading worth the effort in recognizing women contributing to science and the social fabric of a society simultaneously. The remaining ten books we read this year included Stone Cold by David Baldacci, Red War by Kyle Mills in the Vince Flynn series, The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien with Guy Gruviel Kay and Christopher Tolkien, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving, Lethal Agent by Kyle Mills through Vince Flynn,  Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work by Marilee Adams and Divine Justice by David Baldacci.

Matt Lynn Digital appreciates your continued interest in the content we offer. Should you have albums that you’d like us to review, or similar work to that mentioned above, please be sure to let us know.

Matt – Saturday, December 30, 2023

Dava Sobel and the book ‘The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars’

It was March of 2017 when we last looked into the writing of Dava Sobel with our review of the 1999 book Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love. We return today with our review of Sobel‘s 2016 book The Glass Universe How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, a book every bit as spirited in sharing the value of women in scientific discovery in the face of odds stacked against the proposition.

(Dava Sobel, shown here in 2015, wrote The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars).

The book succeeds in providing portraits of strong, intelligent women working meaningfully in astronomy against a backdrop of history not commonly known. The history offered is a scientific one largely based in the Harvard College Observatory of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The scientific analysis of glass plates, which had been taken of the night sky, were analyzed in ways that revolutionized the field of astronomy. The women were central to the burgeoning field in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in influencing worldwide astronomical research into directions still relevant today. The research shared is impressive in scope and depth, including the work of directors Edward Charles Pickering (1877-1919) and Harlow Shapley (1922-1951), in addition to women that included Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

(From left, Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin).

Mary Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of Henry Draper, and Catherine Wolfe Bruce were an early benefactors to the Harvard program. The ladies sponsored awards that are still given to this day. The science achieved, in addition to these driving forces behind them, are the stories told by Dava Sobel. Those seeking a more comprehensive social tale, in my candid observation of the accomplishments recognized and discussed, will be disappointed if a more social biography point-of-view is the interest in this book.

(Dava Sobel shown here in 2007).

Overall, the educational factor coupled with the subject matter worked for me. I give The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel 3.75-stars on a scale of one-to-five.

Matt – Saturday, November 11, 2023

The Year 2017 in Reading: 35 Books (The Silver Books)

In joining a friend in the aim to read 24 books, or two books per month, you learned with my last blog that we exceeded that goal. 17 books received a bronze rating. On a rating scale of 1-star to 5-stars, Matt with Matt Lynn Digital rated these 15-books with a silver rating of 4.0 stars.

Ranking as a silver rating with 4.00 stars in 2017 included these fifteen (15) books:

Something that strikes me is that each of these books had something to teach me that was both unique and distinct from some experience that I had experienced previously.

Mans Search for Meaning 1

In the Garden of Beasts and Man’s Search for Meaning both look into the larger experience of World War Two from quite different perspectives and motivations. Seeking a relationship with the cultural concept of America is at the core of A Walk in the Woods and  Team of Rivals, at least for my reading of these two works this year.

a-walk-in-the-woods-1

A deep and soul-searching self-examination were important for the works by Joan Didion and Khaled Hosseini. The larger arcs of history were examined in Dava Sobel and Virginia Woolf, both for women and for culture. Dickens and Ishiguro share a cultural review of wealth and British culture, stoicism, and an interest in uplift.

A Room of One's Own 3

The Secret History by Donna Tartt is perhaps a demonstration of the best newer author that I have read on the list of those included in our list of writers. The many perspectives and internal dialogues are quite engaging, nuanced, and prompts me to want to seek out more. For this result, I offer praise.

The Secret History

The above listing of books reflects the silver listing of books that I read in 2017. The bronze listing was published yesterday. A gold listing will follow soon.

Matt – Saturday, December 30, 2017

Politics mingles with post-Reformation Europe in Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

Politics mingles with post-Reformation Europe in Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love. The book as written by Dava Sobel offers the reader a baited hook in terms of the close relationship between iconic scientist and Roman Catholic Galileo Galilei and his eldest daughter and cloistered nun,  Maria Celeste. While the book certainly offers crumbs to the bond between these two based on the limited surviving correspondence, the truth of the matter is that the book justifiably brings more focus into the life and times of Galileo.

The book does an engaging job of laying out the career, travels, brilliance, and creativity of the scientist that we know as the biggest influence in arguing for the sun as the center of the solar system. The many distresses that Galilei endured in his efforts to explain the nature of the world came into sharp exposition and challenge by the Roman Catholic church of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in and around Rome.

The Roman Catholic church was a largely political animal in this time that had suffered challenges to its political and spiritual authority spurred by the Protestant Reformation as notably instigated by theologian Martin Luther, theologian and journalist John Calvin, and King Henry VIII of England. Galileo suffered from findings of heresy and censorship as a response to that Reformation through the Roman Catholic church’s Counter-Reformation efforts. The story of Galileo’s one trial at the hands of the Roman Inquisition makes up a more forceful component to Galileo’s Daughter, in my opinion, than does the telling of the relationship between Marie Celeste and Galileo.

Galileo's Daughter 2

Galileo’s Daughter drew me in from the beginning and held my interest throughout the telling. The hook for me was having a front row, biographical telling of the human story of who Galileo Galilei was to those that loved him, were his friends or many dependents, and those that ultimately were there at the end or vacated their sense of decency, open-mindedness, and political courage in the face of Pope Urban VIII’s inquisitor, Father Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola.

The 1633 heresy conviction that resulted in house arrest for the remainder of Galileo‘s life (he outlives his daughter Maria Celeste) is captured well with tension, interest, and excellently with the hook of Maria Celeste’s loving interest. The earlier telling of Galileo’s telescopic inventions, motion experiments (including in Pisa), and increasingly earned influence were phenomenal. I think that I concur with one of author Dava Sobel‘s earlier arguments; namely, Galileo Galilei was able to reconcile science with his religion. That Galilei was clearly ahead of western culture in reconciling these two, then as now, is a story still with us today.

My overall grade for Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love is 4-stars out of 5.

Matt – Thursday, March 30, 2017