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  • The American Scholar

    Heaven and the Heretic

    Mar 02, 2020 4 minutes
    Review by Sam Kean

    GALILEO AND THE SCIENCE DENIERS

    BY MARIO LIVIO

    Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $28

    MARIO LIVIO MORE or less apologizes up front for writing yet another biography of Galileo. After all, hundreds of books on the physicist already exist, so what’s left to say? Still, Livio thinks that Galileo and the Science Deniers can add to the Galileo canon in three ways. And though he succeeds with two of his aims, he comes up short on the third, albeit through no fault of his own.

    The first reason Livio wrote the book is that most Galileo biographies are pretty dense. There’s a lot

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