Former New York Times Science Writer and novelist Dava Sobel
will be at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library tomorrow evening,
September 10th, at 6PM, to speak about her novel Galileo’s Daughter, The
Planets and Longitude.
Ms. Sobel will be speaking in the Mason O. Damon Auditorium and
signing books afterward. The event, in conjunction with the current exhibition Double
Stars: Men and Women of Astronomy, is free and open to the public. If you
have not been to any events in the library auditorium, nor seen the exhibit,
this is a good excuse to go. Talking Leaves Books will have copies
of Ms. Sobel’s books on hand for purchase.
Galileo’s Daughter is based on 124 surviving letters to Galileo
from his eldest child, which Ms. Sobel translated from the original
Italian. Galileo’s Daughter won the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science
and technology, a 2000 Christopher Award, and was a finalist for the 2000
Pulitzer Prize in biography. The paperback edition enjoyed five consecutive
weeks as the #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller.
In her thirty years as a science journalist she has written for
many magazines, including Discover and The New Yorker, served as a
contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni, and co-authored five
books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake.
She received
the 2001 Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the
2001 Bradford Washburn Award from the Boston Museum of Science, and the 2004
Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, London. In 2008 the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific gave her its Klumpke-Roberts Award for “increasing
the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.”
She is a lifetime member of the International Dark Sky Association
and a volunteer Solar System Ambassador for NASA.
Her current project is a stage play about sixteenth-century
astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, And the Sun Stood Still. The play was
commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club through the Alfred P. Sloan Initiative,
and supported by a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation.
Longitude, recently reissued in a special
tenth-anniversary edition with a foreword by astronaut Neil Armstrong, won
several literary prizes, including the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As a result of her latest book, The Planets, asteroid “30935
Davasobel” was named in her honor.