I picked up A Brief History of Black Holes expecting to learn about black holes. I did. But I also learned that quite a few things I thought I knew about them were completely wrong. Dr Becky Smethurst takes one of the most intimidating subjects in astrophysics and makes it surprisingly approachable. The book traces how our understanding of black holes developed over hundreds of years, from early ideas about incredibly dense objects to Einstein’s theories, the discovery of neutron stars, gravitational waves and, eventually, that famous first image of a black hole.

What I particularly liked was that Smethurst doesn’t begin by throwing equations at you and hoping you survive. Instead, she uses analogies, humour and pop-culture references to make strange concepts feel a little less strange. Black holes aren’t cosmic vacuum cleaners waiting to suck everything nearby into oblivion. They are also not really “holes”. In fact, one of the book’s recurring ideas is that our mental picture of a black hole is probably one of the first things we need to get rid of, and then there is spaghettification, possibly one of the funniest names ever given to something you absolutely do not want happening to you.

The book also does something I appreciated: it doesn’t treat science as a collection of facts that simply appeared in textbooks. It tells the story through the people who questioned, calculated, observed and sometimes got things spectacularly wrong before getting them right. That makes the history of black holes feel less like a finished chapter of science and more like an ongoing investigation. That said, the book isn’t completely effortless. Some of the concepts still require concentration, particularly when Smethurst gets deeper into the physics. The humour and pop-culture references won’t work for everyone either. They occasionally make the book feel a little too determined to be entertaining when the science itself is already fascinating enough.

But that’s a relatively small complaint. The biggest strength of this book is that it doesn’t make you feel stupid for not understanding astrophysics. It meets you somewhere in the middle and slowly takes you further into the universe. By the end, I didn’t suddenly become an astrophysicist. I did, however, look at the night sky a little differently and perhaps that’s the best thing a popular science book can do, not make you an expert, but make you curious enough to look up.

Rating: 4/5

A good pick if you want to understand black holes without first needing a degree in physics.