Black Hole Survival Guide

June 1, 2020

A University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, Barrett (How Emotions Are Made) gives us Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, explaining the origin, structure, and function of that blobby gray mass (50,0000-copy first printing). In This Is the Voice, New Yorker staffer Colapinto, author of the New York Times best-selling As Nature Made Him, explains how this most efficient means of communication defines humans individually and as a whole (75,000-copy first printing). The Dalai Lama's Our Only Home calls on politicians--and encourages the younger generation--to save our planet (50,000-copy first printing). Cambridge historian Falk's The Light Ages shows that the so-called Dark Ages were actually lit up by a keen scientific culture, as universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks got their start. The Kolokotrones University Professor and chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, public health giant Farmer offers an account of the 2014 Ebola crisis that should be especially revealing for us today; as suggested by the title, Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, there's sociopolitical context here (20,000-copy first printing). Fung follows up his internationally best-selling The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code by discussing not just the origin and treatment of cancer but its prevention in The Cancer Code (100,000-copy first printing). Having explored the mental life of octopuses in Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith, a scuba-diving professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, now looks more deeply into animal consciousness in Metazoa. Barnard astrophysicist Levin, a PEN/Bingham Prize-winning novelist and director of sciences at the arts-and-sciences center Pioneer Works, has the wherewithal to provide a Black Hole Survival Guide explaining the cosmos.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 7, 2020
“Black holes are special because there’s nothing there,” astrophysicist Levin (How the Universe Got Its Spots) observes playfully at the start of her enthusiastic cosmic survey. She begins with how Einstein’s general theory of relativity, in predicting that gravity can bend light and space, laid the groundwork for first the conceptualization, and later the discovery, of collapsed stars so massive that their gravity prevents even light from escaping. Then, 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, from how quasars represent “the entire core of an ancient galaxy shining energetically billions of light-years,” to how producing the first image of a black hole was equivalent to “reading the date on a quarter in San Francisco from New York City.” Readers couldn’t hope for a more fascinating intro to a family of cosmic objects whose existence promises still more wonders to be discovered.

September 15, 2020
A short, lively account of one of the oddest and most intriguing topics in astrophysics. Levin, a Guggenheim fellow and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, knows her subject well, but her goal is appreciation as much as education, and there is much to admire in a black hole. Before Einstein, writes the author, scientists believed that the force of gravity influenced the speed of moving objects. They also knew that light always travels at exactly the speed of light. This combination made no sense until 1915, when Einstein explained that gravity is not a force but a curving of space (really, space-time) near a body of matter. The more massive the matter, the greater it curves the space in its vicinity; other bodies that approach appear to bend or change speed when they are merely moving forward through distorted space-time. Einstein's equations indicated that, above a certain mass, space-time would curve enough to double back on itself and disappear, but this was considered a mathematical curiosity until the 1960s, when objects that did just that began turning up: black holes. Light cannot emerge from a black hole, but it is not invisible. Large holes attract crowds of orbiting stars whose density produces frictional heating and intense radiation. No writer, Levin included, can contain their fascination with the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole where space-time doubles back. Nothing inside the event horizon, matter or radiation, can leave, and anything that enters is lost forever. Time slows near the horizon and then stops. The author's discussions of the science behind her subject will enlighten those who have read similar books, perhaps the best being Marcia Bartusiak's Black Hole (2015). Readers coming to black holes for the first time will share Levin's wonder but may struggle with some of her explanations. An enthusiastic appreciation of a spectacular astrophysical entity.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2020
Most of us will never get anywhere near a black hole, but Levin, a physics and astronomy professor at Barnard and author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (2016), takes readers on a hypothetical journey into the heart of one of the universe's greatest curiosities in this absorbing exploration. Levin posits the reader as an astronaut on a deep-space station in the proximity of a black hole, then provides an in-depth explanation of what a person would see approaching it and what the experience of being pulled into one would feel like, what would be visible from inside the black hole, and, finally, what a person would endure being "simultaneously flayed, shredded, and pulverized to death." In the latter half of the book, Levin delves into contemporary research into black holes, including the theoretical creation of a microscopic one in a laboratory and what's going on at the quantum level in a black hole, making for somewhat denser reading. Armchair astronomers will find this a fascinating and illuminating read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)