User:Rrosendo/sandbox2

Description
Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei is a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Peter Sis in 1996. It is a 1997 Caldecott Honor book.Through the use of his illustrations, Peter Sis documents different stages of life of the widely acknowledged scientist Galileo Galilei.

Plot
'Starry Messenger" written and illustrated by Peter Sis documents the life of the acclaimed scientist Galileo Galilei. Dating back to his birth, Sis walks the reader through the events that shape the life of the recognized scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and physicist, Galileo Galilei. While hinging on the discovery that Galileo is most known for (Copernican theory of the solar system) the book does document other of his discoveries. The book opens with a prelude, with careful illustrations, Peter Sis sets the stage for the story by laying the groundwork of what the world was like during Galileo’s era. He introduces the reader to the then accepted ideology of the Ptolemaic System, which stated that the earth was the center of the solar system. Sis describes Galileo as a boy “born with stars in his eyes”, this metaphor will run throughout the length of the story connecting prominent events that occur within Galileo’s life. Intersped with Sis’s original illustrations are excerpts of Galileo’s actual drawings and excerpts of his “Starry Night” which documents Galileo’s astronomical discoveries and observations. Peter Sis records Galileo's life as a child, describing the person that he was and his fascination with the stars that led to many of his discoveries, to the infamous incident with the Vatican Church. When his theories reached the Pope, Galileo was forced to retract his earlier statements that defied the laws of the Vatican Church regarding the placement of the Earth, or risk death. Galileo chose to retract his statements and was confined to house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642. The book ends on a positive note when Sis writes about the Pardon that was issued to Galileo more than three hundred years later in October of 1992.

Critical Reception
Peter Sis’s documentation of the acclaimed scientist, Galileo Galileo’s life received positive reviews from: Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, The School Library Journal and more. The New York Times had a section dedicated to the book praising Sis’s book, Elizabeth Spires writes, “The story of Galileo is not about a larger-than-life hero, but of someone understandably human.” She also writes, “in creating this original and exquisite book, affirms the power of one individual to change our ideas about the universe we live in.” The reviews commentate Pete Sis’s achievements in portraying Galileo’s life with “stellar illustrations” and interweaving some of Galileo’s original content from his acclaimed, “Starry Night”.