Description: Richard Goodwin has been admired as a penetrating policy-maker and political commentator, a vivid essayist, an outspoken lawyer, and a writer of controversial books -- now he will also be known as a dramatist. His subject is one that he considers to lie at the heart of everything we call modern: the epic struggle between the great Tuscan thinker Galileo and his arch-opponent. Pope Urban VIII -- once a companionable fellow-philosopher, now the prince of a church threatened by Galileo's new natural science.

Goodwin has cunningly discerned the points of human tension in the spiritual and philosophical drama that the confrontation between these two men represents. In a richly detailed, vividly plotted play -- it truly "reads like a novel" -- we see how powerful, sometimes tropic forces shaped their dispute, forces that would doom Galileo's life yet redeem his ideas, that vindicated the pope's authority in the short term but weakened it in the end. These two are protagonists of huge character and bounding intelligence, tied by affection and separated by doctrine, surrounded by compromised and uncertain colleagues, by gallant friends and family. Perhaps only a lawyer could have structured their drama with such a vivid sense of the risks they took, and perhaps only a politically experienced writer could see, as no other dramatist has, the many facets of the power

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