Caleb Scharf - Gravity's Engines

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good if slightly florid account 

This is a good, generally readable account of the nature of black holes, recent discoveries about them and their influence on the universe. Caleb Scharf is a distinguished scientist in the field, giving him a depth of knowledge and insight which makes the content of this book very good.

Scharf takes us through the basics of gravity and relativity needed to understand these extraordinary objects and manages to do it without any mathematical equations, which will probably be a relief to the non-scientific reader. He gives a pretty clear account of the physics of the formation and evolution of the universe, of stars and galaxies and of the behaviour of black holes themselves. He manages to describe very comprehensibly the recent discoveries about black holes and the deductions which he and others are beginning to make about their role in the development of the universe and possibly of life here.

The book is generally well written but does have its flaws, chief of which is the tendency, common in US-based science writers, to overdo the florid language and metaphors in their wish to make the subject accessible. As just one example, Scharf introduces a fairly good analogy of a sack full of a representative sample of the universe, but precedes it with a rather lengthy, wholly irrelevant rigmarole about imagining a box delivered to our door which we bring in, puzzle over, open and find a sack inside... and so on. There is quite a lot of this sort of thing and while it isn't enough to spoil the book, I certainly found it rather irritating. Scharf is at his best when describing his own research and discoveries which he does with an excitement and directness which really brought it alive, and I wish the whole book could have been written in this tone.

In spite of the flaws, I can recommend this as a very interesting and up-to-date (as of February 2013) account of some of the most extraordinary and fascinating objects in the universe. Well worth reading.