"From the acclaimed author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space--an authoritative, wholly accessible, fascinating guide to the most challenging phenomena of contemporary science, which is now the anchor of our understanding of the cosmos. Throughout her career, astrophysicist Janna Levin has focused, alongside her research, on making the science she studies not just accessible, but, perhaps more important, intriguing to the nonscientist. And that is what she has done again here, helping us to understand the black hole: perhaps the most opaque theoretical construct ever imagined by physicists. She explains how their existence came to be proven decades after they were first predicted in Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity. And she explores the ways in which what we know about them has changed our most basic understanding of the galaxy, the universe, the whole expanse of reality that we inhabit. Lively, engaging and utterly unique, Black Hole Survival Guide is not just informative. It is as well, a wonderful read from first to last"--