How many books about scientific concepts are funny and fun to read? Not too many, methinks. Carolyn Decristofano explains black holes via excellent analogies (a singularity is like a peanut with the mass of a trillion elephants!), thought experiments (imagine you approach the event horizon of a black hole and your foot stretches in front on you like a spaghetti noodle!), and great flow from one topic to the next (start with Newtonian gravity--that's pretty easy to get--and wait until the end to blow your mind with Einsteinian gravity!).

The illustrations are all also excellent, both in terms of elucidating concepts and capturing imaginations with the beauty of space.

I sincerely wish more non-fiction books were written with this much wit and verve, especially when it comes to books about math and science. In all honestly, I don't retain much of what I read about stuff like black holes, but with this book I had such a good time reading it, who cares? ( )

A great upper elementary book! I listened to this book as an audiobook and found it just as engaging as a science podcast. Written for kids the book is separated out into chapters each addressing a big question about space/black holes. The authors do a good job of helping kids understand the magnitude of space, giving metaphors for how to think about big concepts like gravity, and talking about where the earth and our galaxy fit in. They add in enough humor to keep engagement high too!

A great recommendation for any kid obsessed with space, or an in the car book to keep the learning going after school. I would be interested in seeing the visuals in the print version, I think there may be some excellent diagrams to help with some of the bigger topics. ( )

If you're looking for an overview of black holes, this is a good place to look. I might have done better to read the physical book as there were a lot of numbers that we're difficult for me to visualize with the audio. Something I could visualize just fine but wish I couldn't: spaghettification. *shudder* Something cool: the center of the Milky Way appears to be a black hole in the constellation Sagittarius, my Zodiac sign. ( )

Summary:
This book tackles the misconceptions people often have about black holes. The book is broken into chapters titled by questions that people often ask about black holes. Within each chapter, the author broke down misconceptions and explained how black holes form, what they might look like, and other properties.

Review:
Once again, I think that this book would be an excellent addition to an upper-elementary library. The author uses fun text and detailed illustrations to pull the reader in. Additionally, the author balances a relaxed tone with academic language to make the topic approachable while not straying from larger vocabulary. This book would be a good addition to a unit on density or gravity. Students could extend the metaphor of space being like a blanket to an experiment where they observe how objects of different densities sink at different depths when placed on a taught blanket. ( )

The inclusion of the scientists and there contributions to the discovery of black holes it important because their ideas contribute to many other scientific discoveries. Also that imagination, art, math, and science can work together to formulate these ideas and theories about things that we cannot directly see or touch. Also DeCristofano’s extensive breakdown of the distances and massiveness of the universe is crucial to comprehension. Her informal discussion works well because this is a heavy topic but she break it down in a fun and informative way.