While acting on my longstanding desire to write a play about Nicolaus Copernicus, I visited Poland three times and conducted enough research to fill a book. The play at the book’s heart, “And the Sun Stood Still,” portrays the people and events pushing Copernicus to publish his rearrangement of the cosmos.

The nonfiction narrative surrounding the play tells the facts of his life story and traces the impact of his seminal work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, to the present day.

After spending nearly two centuries on the Index of Prohibited Books, copies of Copernicus’s masterpiece now sell for several million dollars at auction.

Reviews

“All enthralling, all illuminating. As in her previous books, Sobel…turns the history of science into a great story filled with fascinating characters, excruciating near-misses and the sudden splendor of the new discovery.”—Chicago Tribune

“Lively, inventive…masterly…a thoroughly researched and eminently readable account of a major scientist who celebrated the sun yet lurks in the shadows.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A delightful immersion into tumultuous times.”—The Washington Post

“The wonderful detail and eloquent writing that Sobel demonstrated in her best-selling Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter carry the reader along here, too…The book is first-rate.”—Nature