Say what you will about Dava Sobel (I don’t know anything personal about her), but I know her book Galileo’s Daughter is some of the best historical writing around.
I love Dava Sobel’s work. I worked with a woman at MIT/LL who had met Dava Sobel. She had been in charge of the LINEAR program, that at one time had found about 90% of all near earth asteroids known. She had an asteroid named after her, not in some phony “book of records” but by the IAU. (I might add that she was the best groomed human being, the asteroid lady, not Dava Sobel, I have ever met.)