Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother

by James A. Connor

Set against the backdrop of the witchcraft trial of his mother, this lively biography of Johannes Kepler – 'the Protestant Galileo' and 16th century mathematician and astronomer – reveals the surprisingly spiritual nature of the quest of early modern science.

In the style of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, Connor's book brings to life the tidal forces of Reformation, Counter–Reformation, and social upheaval. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the three basic laws of planetary motion, was persecuted for his support of the Copernican system. After a neighbour accused his mother of witchcraft, Kepler quit his post as the Imperial mathematician to defend her.

James Connor tells Kepler's story as a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey into the modern world through war and disease and terrible injustice, a journey reflected in the evolution of Kepler's geometrical model of the cosmos into a musical model, harmony into greater harmony. The leitmotif of the witch trial adds a third dimension to Kepler's biography by setting his personal life within his own times. The acts of this trial, including Kepler's letters and the accounts of the witnesses, although published in their original German dialects, had never before been translated into English. Echoing some of Dava Sobel's work for Galileo's Daughter, Connor has translated the witch trial documents into English. With a great respect for the history of these times and the life of this man, Connor's accessible story illuminates the life of Kepler, the man of science, but also Kepler, a man of uncommon faith and vision.

Genres: History, Science, Biography, Nonfiction, Religion, Astronomy, History Of Science

428 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 30, 2004

About the author

James A. Connor is the author of Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother and Silent Fire: Bringing the Spirituality of Silence to Everyday Life. A former Jesuit priest, Connor is professor of English at Kean University in Union, New Jersey; he has also held teaching posts at St. Louis University and Gonzaga University. He is a director of studies at the Lessing Institute in Prague. He holds degrees in geoscience, philosophy, theology, and creative writing, and a Ph.D. in literature and science. He is a prize-winning essayist published widely in such places as American Book Review, Traditional Home, Willow Springs, The Critic, The Iowa Review, and The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies.

Reviews

[Dani Goodwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the introduction of the book, the author, James Connor, says:

If I have any mea culpas to make in this book, one is this—I did not try to give an account, except as a sketch, of Kepler’s science.

Indeed, in this book, the information about the great scientific achievements of Johannes Kepler is scant. I believe that the majority of the people, who would be interested in reading about Kepler, are people with some level of interest in astronomy, mathematics, or science. If you are one of them, you will be disappointed by what the book has to offer for you. (As a matter of fact, when writing about Kepler’s science, the author spends the most time explaining Kepler’s least important publication, Mysterium Cosmographicum.)

The book’s focus is on Christian theology and the religious conflicts in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Kepler, like most people of his time, was deeply religious. Science and religion during the Renaissance were very much intermingled. And yet, I find the religious emphasis in this book irksome. James Connor is a former Jesuit priest which probably explains in part that trait of his book.

Lastly, the book needs additional editing. It is disorganized and, at times, repetitive. This is especially true for the second half of the book. The balance between writing about Kepler and providing background information seems lost at times. There are also some minor factual errors. In Chapter 7, Connor writes: “the archduke [Ferdinand II] discharged him [Kepler] from his position as the district mathematician for Upper Austria.” The thing is, at that time Kepler is in Graz, Styria not Upper Austria. (Linz, Upper Austria, comes twelve years later.)

On the good side, the chapters of the book are alternated with original translations of various Kepler’s correspondence. Some letters are quite curious to read. The book also contains illustrations, one at the beginning of each chapter, which I found helpful when trying to visualize the stories on the following pages.

I absolutely agree with James Connor that Johannes Kepler deserves more recognition. Kepler was a great person and a great mind who somehow did not attain the fame of Copernicus, Gallileo, or Newton, although he is truly worthy of it. Writing a book about Johannes Kepler is an excellent way to popularize Kepler’s name and achievements. Just this particular book does not reach the full potential of the good idea.

[Ubiquitousbastard · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is misleading. Hardly any of the monograph is concerned with his mother's trial and there is very little about witchcraft at all. Most of the book is concerned with minute accomplishments of Kepler and the kind of insignificant details of his personal life. I really don't care how many kids he had and when, and what their names were. Or worse, the twelve women he almost married are mentioned twice for some odd reason. Actually, there is quite a bit of repetition in this, with the same events or people introduced more than once, and utterly wasting my time.

I mean, Kepler was an interesting man and had a pretty eventful and tragic life, but this author sort of reduced his life to a laundry list. Basically, boring. I understand that monographs aren't usually intended to be read cover to cover, but that's what I do with books, and several non-fictions have been incredibly interesting to read that way. I think this would function best as a reference rather than something to read for general knowledge or entertainment.

[William Shep · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book in some ways. Great topic about the great German astronmer's life and work and the turmoil of religious intolerance and ignorance that often inhibited his great work and hounded his poor mother to death. However, the book is not well integrated and often repetitive. Despite these problems it is well worth the reading.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first introduction to Johannes Kepler came through Carl Sagan's television documentary Cosmos. Mr. Sagan presented Kepler as proverbial scientific hero--like Galileo, a man under intense pressure to recant or revise his work to satisfy prevailing worldviews of the day. Yet Kepler was also a devout Lutheran who stood up to the Counter-Reformation even as his own church dismissed him. Through this book, that sense of Kepler as a brave scientific pioneer was reinforced for me, and I gained new empathy for his tumultuous and often tragic life in the early 17th Century.

James A. Connor's book is not strictly a biography. He invests whole chapters of this book discussing the violent religious/political climate against which Kepler made seminal discoveries in orbital and optical mechanics. At times I felt Dr. Connor got carried away in narrating various battles and political upheavals that didn't involve Kepler directly. But overwhelmingly, these sections provided an intense sense of the volatile social climate Kepler had to navigate. At times I all but lost my breath realizing how close Kepler came to not living long enough, or well enough, to complete his pioneering calculations--calculations that prepared the way for Isaac Newton's later, and more famous, successes.

Ultimately, Dr. Connor's book is an emotional and spiritual portrait, which given that Kepler likely went to his grave with a firm hope in Christian salvation, is entirely appropriate. It also makes Kepler more accessible to non-scientists like me. Dr. Connor is a former Jesuit priest, and that sensibility serves him well in humanizing Kepler. Though the sometimes wandering narrative structure of this book stalled my reading at times, I felt an expanded gratitude for Kepler and his work.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book for those who know something of Kepler from the science realm but know little about his personal life. He went through an amazing number of hardships, which makes it all the more amazing that he accomplished what he did in astronomy. It also gave me a new respect for him as a Christian who followed his own conscience, even though it caused him lots of grief in his personal life. Better to be true to one's conscience than to please men.

The story of Kepler's mother, who was accused of being a witch, was also fascinating. This was a time when trials of witches were common. Fortunately, although she was eventually convicted, she was not sentenced to death.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great book! Not so much because of the writing - in fact the way the book is written is annoying in many ways, such as repeating things many times and omitting important dates, even the date of Kepler's death. But the book is fantastic because of the subject matter. Kepler was a fascinating character. A world renown scientist and astronomer, but he was also argumentative and difficult to get on with and he had a profound faith in God and would not be swayed in his beliefs no matter how much pressure was put on him. And pressure WAS put on him. First by the Lutheran church to recant his views of communion, and then by the Catholics who drove him out of home many times because he refused to cede his beliefs to Catholic orthodoxy.

And herein is why this book is so great to read. Although it doesn't deal with the science and mathematics of Kepler (who discovered the laws of planetary motion among other things) it does deal with Kepler the man and the society in which he lived. The Reformation was in full swing at the end of the 16th century but by the early 17th century the Catholic counter-reformation was building, finally culmination in the Thirty Years War - a war that engulfed the whole of Europe and cost 8 million lives.

This book is not a magnificent work of art and if you wanted to read a comprehensive account of Kepler's life you could probably find a better book. But if you want to immerse yourself in the life and times of a scientific giant, if you want to get lost in a fascinating era of history, if you want to read a biography that leaves you wondering what happens next after every chapter, read this one. You won't be sorry.

[John Gribbin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Joint review

Heavenly Intrigue
By Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder

Kepler’s Witch
By James A. Connor


One of the delights of reviewing is to have your expectations overturned. I was doubly lucky with these two books. When I first looked at them, I anticipated that Kepler’s Witch would be an intriguing account of one of the more obscure events in the life of the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, but that Heavenly Intrigue, which suggests that Kepler murdered his patron Tycho Brahe, would be the work of some cranks with no real understanding of history. I was wrong on both counts.
Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630, making him a contemporary of William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei. The Pilgrim fathers founded the Plymouth colony when Kepler was 49. He was one of the giants on whose work the scientific revolution was based, and in particular he worked out the laws of planetary motion, later used by Isaac Newton in developing his theory of gravity. Indeed, it is often wrongly assumed that Newton’s famous remark about “standing on the shoulders of giants” refers to people like Kepler and Tycho. In fact, Newton made that remark in the context of his work on light, long before the theory of gravity was developed; but as a metaphor, it is still a good description of the relationship between Kepler and Newton.
Kepler had a tough life, starting out in poverty in the German town of Weil der Statt, with an abusive father, involving a childhood attack of smallpox which left him with weak eyesight, dependant on the observations of other astronomers (notably Tycho) for the data he needed, and, indeed, including the trial of his elderly mother for witchcraft. His story has all the makings of a gripping biography. But James Connor’s book is not that biography. It contains all the facts, but it is a dull read, overlong, and the author wears his learning too self-consciously. In spite of the title, the story of the witchcraft trial is not central to the book, and the treatment given here only serves to highlight how interesting a shorter, more focussed account of this aspect of Kepler’s life would be.
The most surprising feature of the book, to anyone who has studied Kepler’s life, is Connor’s claim that his subject had an “embrace of astrology” which “more than anything else . . . puts Kepler at a distance from our age.” [ED: top of page 49] Actually, the impoverished Kepler cast horoscopes only in order to make money, and in his private correspondence referred to his clients as “fatheads” and described astrology as “silly and empty.” This makes him much more in tune with modern thinking than most of his contemporaries!
But if Kepler’s Witch is disappointing, Heavenly Intrigue is a delight. Written much more crisply and with a momentum that carries the reader along, Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder take far less space to give us pacey accounts of the lives and times of both their protagonists. These are the rich, aristocratic Dane Tycho Brahe (who in his youth fought a duel which resulted in a chunk being cut out of his nose, later protected with a silver covering) and the low-born Kepler, always struggling to make ends meet. The story culminates in their eventual meeting. This took place in Prague, where the ageing Tycho (he lived from 1546 to 1601) had a treasure trove of planetary observations, going back over decades, but lacked the mathematical skills to use these data to find the exact orbits of the planets. The younger Kepler had the mathematical skills, but not the data.
It should have been a marriage made in Heaven, but for reasons which the Gilder’s make clear, Tycho was reluctant to part with his data, and Kepler was eager to get on with the job. It was only after Tycho died that Kepler, the obvious scientific heir, was able to get hold of the material he needed. Contemporary accounts tell us that Tycho was at a banquet in honour of a distinguished guest, and out of politeness did not leave the table to relieve himself during the extended meal in spite of drinking large quantities of wine. When he eventually tried to pass urine, he failed; and a few days later died in considerable pain, naming Kepler as his scientific heir on his deathbed. But there must have been some underlying cause – perhaps an infection – triggered by the events at the banquet. One possibility that would fit the accounts is mercury poisoning, and this is the case that the Gilders make. But unlike other authorities, they suggest that the mercury was ingested not as an accidental consequence of Tycho’s alchemy experiments, but through the hand of an enemy – specifically, Kepler.
Was Kepler eager enough to get his hands on the data have poisoned Tycho? I don’t think so, but this account of what might have happened is an enthralling read, as a murder mystery being investigated four centuries after the death. Even regarded as science fiction it is informative and entertaining – which would be appropriate, since Kepler wrote what many regard as the first science fiction story, an account of a mythical flight to the Moon, designed to present some of his astronomical ideas in an accessible form.
Heavenly Intrigue is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend to scientists, Sf fans, and lovers of murder mysteries. Kepler’s Witch will be of interest only to Kepler buffs who want to read everything written about the man.

[Steph LaPlante · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't really what I was anticipating, but I still enjoyed it. Learning about who Kepler was as a person and all the trials he faced in his life was fascinating.

[Pacific · Rating 3 out of 5]

I completely enjoyed reading this book, even though it wasn't the easiest book to read. It take me over a year to read, since I would take breaks to read other books, but I am glad I finished it. The life and story of Kepler a dreamer, mathematician, stargazer, astrologer, devoted to his religion and science, father, and son of an accused witch. The inside scoop on being an emperor's mathematician, never knowing when you would get paid, moving his family from one place to another, his complete belief in the marriage of science with his religion, and stubborn belief of religious tolerance to the point of being excommunicated from the Lutheran Church. The book also made me reminiscence of my trip to Prague and walking around this time in Kepler's footsteps.

James A. Connor also includes great details into the social arrangements of the day involving marriage and family, along with a glimpse of the political landscape within the towns, among the nobility, and religious leaders of the time.

Elvira Sanchez-Kisser

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A better title might have been "Kepler's Faith." His mother's witchcraft trial is important but not central to this overview of Kepler's career. Overall a good read, one that brings Kepler to life and gives the reader a taste of the documents that allowed the author to fill out the story, but the book suffers from serious organizational problems. Between the flashbacks and the presaging, there is a tedious amount of repetition. Couple this with the primary sources that preface each chapter and the reader often gets the same facts (with little or no added context or information) as often as four times. Much of the contextualization is well-done, but the details about political intrigues and battles (including a long and gratuitous description of the atrocities of the sack of Rome a couple of decades before Kepler's birth) are out of place and only occasionally tied back into Kepler's story.

[Eugene Kernes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kepler’s life is the core of this book. Weaved from Kepler’s journal is a story of a particular time in the Christian faith and Kepler’s response. Cycles of productivity and depression due to various circumstances enabled Kepler to write a variety of books. Portions of the science, novelty, and philosophy in those books are summarized in this book, but as this book is about the life of Kepler, detail regarding the intimates of his insights are lacking. The way Kepler’s insights interacted with the political sphere of his life are ubiquitous.

As Kepler’s father was rarely home, Kepler’s mother, Katharina, took care of him and his siblings. It was when Katharina took Kepler to see a comet that potentially inspired Kepler to become an astronomer. But the character type that she passed onto Kepler was extreme stubbornness. When they believed they were right, they would not let it go. With Katharina, it can be expressed as her innocence of witchcraft as she came back to her city and thought that the truth would win. With Kepler it was heresy, because he would not agree to a bit of the church’s stance, he would fight for his intellectual freedom.

The belief in witches was a worldview rather than a superstition. The worldview held that for every problem, there must have been some benefactor. People blamed as various problems on witches, and as witches had caused the problem, they demanded the which to rectify it. The choosing of who was a witch was based on oddity. As communities rarely saw different people, the individuals in the community which were deemed odd became highly likely to be considered as witches. 75% of witches were women with the description of a witch matching the description of an old women during those times.

It was conflict with the neighbors that caused witches to be persecuted, not a different faith. For Katharina, it was partly due to her herbal medicine and jealously of Kepler that caused the community to turn against her. Kepler was an imperial mathematician with his own problem of heresy. The community might have wanted to accuse Kepler, but he had powerful political influence. Katharina did not have such influence, and as Kepler’s influence was far away, the community could make her suffer. Only with powerful political influence could an accused be spared. Katharina’s trial was much like other witch trials. Many trial claims were not based on witness accounts, but because they were a presumed requirement for a witch.

Kepler’s trouble with the church was based on disagreed with a small part of the church’s ideology, the ubiquity doctrine. His greatest crime, wanting peace between Christian sects. At a time when every denomination was looking for war, peace was heresy. For Kepler’s believes, he was excommunicated from his own church, and would not convert to the Catholic church which wanted him. He remained a devout Lutheran, and as a Lutheran debate was normal. At the time, the church was a normal place for intellectual discussion.

Lutherans appear to follow the original understanding of Christianity, that faith was a matter of personal conscience. To preserve a faith and prevent a battle of confusion, the church was needed to create some uniformity. The reformation occurred because too much power was held in the authorities. Luther revived the individual faith and individual conscience ideas. Kepler’s disagreement with the Lutheran church should have been acceptable, but his own church required conformity.

As Kepler reasoned, religion should be protected by theological debate, not soldiers. The religious war caused difficulties with intellectual freedom. Kepler recognized that any disagreement was cause for denunciation. Agreeing little bit with a different faith was cause for heresy.

The science of Kepler cannot be easily separated from his faith. Kepler was thinking of planets and stars because that got him closer to the secret of God’s mind. The solutions for his work and faith, Kepler would need to study and find the solutions on his own. He could not be told to believe in an idea for credulous reasons. We would not take a position he did not fully believe in.

Astronomy at the time was about appearances in space while physics was about movements on earth. Kepler wanted to understand what actually happened, rather than their appearance. When Kepler was lent a telescope, he formed a group to act as a sort of controlled experiment. Each person taking turns with the observations and sharing the findings after everyone had taken their own observations. An interesting note on Kepler is that he formed the bases of the 1st and 2nd law of gravity, which was to be named later by Newton.

Part of Kepler’s astronomy work included the Rudolphine Tables which used his mentors and colleague’s data. The data of Tycho Brahe, like all astronomer’s data, was well guarded. Kepler wanted the data to be more open, but the astronomer’s data was connected to their reputations. Although Kepler was never rich, and his family was usually impoverished due to the imperial promised income that never came, another source of income for Kepler was astrology. Although skeptical of astrology, he was known for pretty accurate predictions about an uncertain future.

This book covered Kepler’s life at every juncture. From the difficulty of his work to the tragedies of losing many children, Conner wrote a complete picture of what made Kepler. From family to politics, from witchcraft to religion, Kepler’s responses were well explained. Short synopsis of the scientific achievements were provided.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was quite an interesting book. Kepler lived in an incredibly difficult time during the history of Europe, and he managed to accomplish great things. His mother was tried for witchcraft, he was persecuted for his religion, he suffered from depression, and several of his children died. I didn't know much about him, and this was a good read. It would have been better if I knew a bit more about European history, because I kept getting confused about who was who, and there were some descriptions of battle that were a bit too graphic for my taste, but other than that, I really enjoyed it.

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would really give this a 3.5 but only because I found it so full of information it was at times difficult to track. Very interesting material, and obviously well researched as indicated in the nicely annotated notes. So many wars and so much conflict between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics, it makes our skirmishes look a bit more innocent. Or just stupid. Kepler wanted everyone to get along. He was promised so much and given so little, it is amazing what he accomplished in his impoverished life and up against so many barricades.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Places Kepler in context, while outlining his contributions to astronomy lots of interesting stuff about him and his patrons and mentors. Especially Brahe.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago, when I was in college, I took an intro to astronomy class. Our professor was an eccentric dude. He wore hiking boots to every class, had a beard that would make Gimli jealous, and wore an Indiana Jone's hat all the time. When he would lecture, he would just kinda lose himself in his own words. He turned out to be one of my most memorable professors and the class ended up being one of my favorites of all-time.

On his recommendation I picked up Kepler's Witch. I started it, and enjoyed what little I read but being a dumb young college student, I never finished it.

This past year I was teaching a unit on the Scientific Revolution and of course, Kepler is a centerpiece of that historical process. As I lectured from my notes, I tried to tap into my memory for any tid-bits of information from the book, but really, to no avail. After completing the unit, I promised I would read the book and integrate it into my teaching for the future.

I just finished the book and I'm so happy that I did. I learned so much about Kepler and his life. In some ways he's a tragic figure, death seemed to follow his family everywhere.

I mean, we all know Kepler was a genius. A revolutionary thinker ahead of his time, but what this book does is really give you a picture of the man. The source material is abundant, every chapter ends with a letter penned by Kepler himself. This allows us to get a deeper picture of the man. Away from the myth, who was he really.

Kepler was a genius, no doubt. What James Connor does well in this book is provide us the socio-political context of Kepler's life. As a Protestant in Central Europe, Kepler lived through the Counter-Reformation and the 30 Years War. His life and work were in a constant state of influx, like a leaf caught between two winds he was always on the move, at the mercy of forces beyond his power.

Kepler's persistence in the face of adversity are a marvel. Ultimately, more than his genius his stubborn refusal to give up on his life work is what I would consider his defining characteristic. Maybe, this is a common trait among those that reach for and touch the stars.

[Jrobertus · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really about Kepler’s life and times rather than his science. The author is a former priest and so it is not surprising that Kepler’s struggles of faith as a dedicated Lutheran figure prominently. Kepler was a truly brilliant observer and mathematician but it is interesting home religion colored his attempts at rational science, just as it did for Newton who spent more time on alchemy than physics. The author does a good job giving the reader a feel for how different this God besotted era was from our own and Kepler saw the ravages of the horrendous 30 years war. In addition, as the title suggests, his mother was accused of witch craft and Kepler has a terrible time saving her from torture and death. It is hard for modern people to imagine that 400 years ago these claims were valid. Ignorant people felt poor harvests, illness or other misfortunes had be caused by some devil worshipping agent. I felt this book was overlong, with way more details about the life and travels and meeting with bishops and dukes than was interesting or even germane to the main ideas. In spite of that, the careful description of the times, bolstered by letters by and to Kepler, provided a most interesting look into the intellectual and social life of 16th and early 17th century Europe.

[Jay H. Hahn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very, very rarely do I slap a book closed barely a sixth of the way read and say to myself with overwhelming relief, "I never have to read another word!"
It's not like the author doesn't know his subject. He is an authority on Kepler. He loves Johannes Kepler. He's exhaustively worked on the writings by and about the man.
James Connor simply cannot write.
The chapters of the book read like a series of magazine articles. That is to say, he repeats things in later chapters that were right there in the previous ones. It is as if you missed an issue or malevolently skipped a chapter. Connor has some clever-isms about things or events that he repeats -word for word- whenever the subject comes up again, and they lose a lot of their cleverness in the second or third rendition.
He jumps about in time, thus creating spoilers, as if a story, a lifetime, has no need of chronology. He starts in on a subject and just before finishing the episode, he wanders off, usually to apologize/explain/extol some other thing in Kepler's doings, and these diversions go on for pages.
No really his fault. He needed a sterner editor. He needed someone at the publisher to say Do Over, Sorry No.
Did Not Finish.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poor editing is clear in these reviews, but I would like to capture why you might want to read this book anyway. Connor presents the world in which Kepler lived, and this context amplifies why Kepler is so interesting. In 1607, he’s saying the moon and the stars are more like earth, rather than floaters of Aristotelian aether. He postulates that “ships of the air, with sails designed for the atmosphere of heaven” could be made. The universe is vast, accessible, and, heretically, not geocentric. He is perhaps the first person to ever describe these realities in a scientific framework. And the context of this open-minded brilliance? His mother is on trial, and may be the 7th witch burned in his town, with evidence like someone getting sick from a drink she gave them. He was shunned from university positions due to his Copernican views. He was repeatedly kicked out of town and rejected by churches for not believing exactly as they told him to. Friends of his were executed for being on the wrong side of religious war. In the pre-Enlightenment days, Kepler was a spark in the abyss despite great personal risk and real suffering. This book captures those aspects pretty well.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of one of history's great scientists--Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), detailing all the struggles he underwent in a time of growing religious bigotry (which led to the devastating Thirty Years' War). And yet with all the turmoil in his life, including his mother being tried for witchcraft, he made essential contributions to science. He confirmed the Copernican universe--and explained the workings of the telescope, something Galileo was unable to do even while making his discoveries with the telescope. He laid the foundations for Newtonian physics, never receiving any credit for his achievements from the great Newton. And all the time he tried to be a good citizen, faithful son, and devout Lutheran.

[Laura]

It took me a very long time to finish this book because I didn’t feel the need to come back to it between reading sessions. It is a very well researched book with lots of great information, but its organization is not strictly chronological and was therefore a little confusing.

I came to this book for the history of science aspect. I got some of that, but more about the politics of the Counter Reformation. I’m interested in that part of history, and I lived for a while in the part of southern Germany where Kepler was from, but even with those vested interests, it didn’t hold my attention. And as other reviewers have pointed out, the witchcraft trial of his mother was only a minor side story in book.

[Lee Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kepler was so much more than the greatest astronomer. He was a man of God.

Of course I came to this book hoping to get an understanding of the great mathematician and scientist but what I got was a perspective of how men of peace suffer in this evil world. Kepler represents what we should all strive to be: honest, hardworking, patient, and committed… even if we aren’t gifted with intelligence as Kepler was.
The author does a great job making the chaotic life of Kepler understandable in the context of the political and religious crisis of his days. How Kepler could accomplish what he did in spite of the challenges is nothing short of a miracle, as the author makes clear. This true story is more than inspirational in light of the problems that we face today.

[ruth gaustad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book worth reading

The author begins his biography of Kepler by recounting a conversation he had during a difficult encounter, stating he was writing this biography because he thought Kepler was a man worth knowing. The author has extensively researched Kepler’s personal life and his significant contribution to astronomy, and writes with a good balance of understanding and historical research. This highly readable book will be of interest to any history buff in general. I came away from this book agreeing with the author that Kepler is indeed well worth knowing.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the genre can be at times mired in details, I enjoy reading biographies, especially about people in science. I like being ”invited” in both the social and scientific life of the proponents and getting a feeling of what has shaped their mind and gave rise to the science. But this book was not that.; the science was definitely missing. It was more a treaty of the Reformation in Europe and of the struggle that Kepler had to endure because of his religious convictions. Although I learned about Lutheranism, I do not come away with clear sense of who the men was.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned so much about Kepler, the Counter-Reformation, and this period of history! The author's style is engaging, often adding a bit of levity to this work that covers bloody wars, Kepler's depression and the burgeoning science of astronomy. My only difficulty as a reader was following the frequent shifts back in time in order to cover different aspects of the same time period. All in all a good read!

[Amanda Lyon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with other readers--the title is inaccurate. The book is not about Kepler's mother, who was tried for witchcraft, but about Kepler. A better title would have been Kepler's Universe or even World, which as written by this author was interesting. It was an enjoyable read. Kepler was a fascinating individual living in an interesting time.

[Ronald · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fascinating biography of Kepler and his times, possibly the first modern scientist, a brilliant man who developed the first modern laws of planetary motion and provided some of the basis for Newton's gravitational theory. His life spanned the Thirty Years war which is also seen here in an interesting way from an individual view. If you have visited Prague you have crossed paths with him.

[Robert E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant story of a genius and the time he lived in

Kepler was one of the first true scientists. He and Galileo both encountered the potent resistance of religious forces to science. You’ll better understand the basis of the 30 Years War and the fight against superstition that ultimately prevailed.

[Amber Scaife · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Johannes Kepler was breaking ground in the field of astronomy, he was also fighting to save his mother from a charge of witchcraft. This book gives an account of that struggle along with a biography of Kepler's life in general. Sounds pretty fascinating, no? Welp. Apparently not, at least as Connor tells it. Bone dry and disappointing.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is misleading. Kepler's mother's trial is a small part of this book. The book is an interesting glimpse into Kepler's religious beliefs and the religious persecution of Lutherans during his time.

[Kevin Likes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, but repetitive

This book has many insights into the forgotten side of the life of Kepler, but the author tends to repeat the same information in the same way multiple places. Still worth a read.