Menu
Next in the queue
63
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
49/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
Janna Levin
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
November 10, 2020
Levin takes us on an evocative exploration of black holes, provoking us to imagine the visceral experience of a black hole encounter. She reveals the influence of black holes as they populate the universe, sculpt galaxies, and even infuse the whole expanse of reality that we inhabit.
What The Reviewers Say
... you have a black hole, a region of the universe that those outside it can never see into — unless we decide to cross that event horizon and take a look. Levin’s book is dressed up as a 'survival guide' to doing just that. It’s a conceit that doesn’t have a lot of mileage because, as she is forced to admit fairly early on, black holes aren’t survivable. It hardly matters: so much about them demands we suspend disbelief that the fact you are being simultaneously shredded and pulverised by gravity during the ride is justa detail.
... illustrated by painter and photographer Lia Halloran, [this] is an exuberant, flashcard-size book of 13 chapters with, naturally, a black cover that draws you in, as it depicts an astronaut similarly attracted toward a mirror-like sphere, perhaps exploring it. Levin takes us on a virtual adventure to black holes, a safe trip that we can actually survive as long as we stay far enough away. Her writing is clear and so colloquial that it sometimes seems as though she’s right there chatting with you, telling a story in a conversation so compelling that you hardly notice the complexity of the actual physics. That’s her trick of talking about science to a lay audience.
Black holes are in need of something of a makeover, argues astrophysicist Janna Levin in her new book, Black Hole Survival Guide , which revisits how we think about black holes.
A short, lively account of one of the oddest and most intriguing topics in astrophysics.
