The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Dava Sobel
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Dava Sobel
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Ms. Sobel writes with an eye for a telling detail and an ear for an elegant turn of phrase. In a single sentence she captures how the women both maternally nurtured and intellectually dominated their male colleagues.
By translating complex information into manageable bites sweetened with human interest stories, Sobel makes hard science palatable for the general audience. Even more than her 1999 book Galileo's Daughter, this new work highlights women's often under-appreciated role in the history of science.
...[a] fantastic new book.
...an elegant historical tale.
Guided by a historian’s sacred principles, she lets the story emerge from the thorough research she documents. Sobel does not condemn or excuse or flatter or even analyze the characters. She does not interpret the past through the lens of the present. She barely interprets the past at all. Even her language emulates the phrasing of the sources, as though modernizing her account would distract readers, reminding them of the interloper who stands between them and sheer documentation. The result is a far more accurate telling, of course, and a much subtler one.
Sobel has a knack for a crisp narrative and a cracking story.
Afficionados of astronomy may be familiar with their names; now it is time they were known to a wider audience. Ms Sobel has drawn deeply from her sources, knitting together the lives and work of the women of Harvard Observatory into a peerless intellectual biography. The Glass Universe shines and twinkles as brightly as the stars themselves..
It’s a familiar story to historians of science (and to most astronomers), but Sobel tells it with brio and sympathy, making excellent use of the rich archival materials preserved mostly at Harvard..
Sobel’s book is slow to launch but once the women do emerge, in their own words, the story comes alive.
Sobel doesn’t provide much guidance in helping us figure out which of Pickering’s female 'computers' were brilliant thinkers and which merely keen-eyed and persistent. For most of the book, we can’t tell whether Sobel’s point is that the women were being abused or provided a nurturing space in which they could prove their intellectual prowess.