... 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.

... with palpable excitement, Levin goes over facts and features of black holes, from the event horizon and the bizarre quantum mechanics involved when black holes 'evaporate,' to their surprisingly common occurrence throughout the universe; the Solar System currently orbits one at the center of the Milky Way, while simultaneously being pulled toward another in the Andromeda galaxy. She shares plenty of vivid details.