This is a book review of Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox.
Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe, by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (William Collins), 2023 (originally published 2022). Pp. 288, 19.7 × 13 cm. Price £19.99 (paperback, 978 0 00 839064 8).
This book is about the mathematical theory of black holes. There is little material on astrophysics and that is only to understand the formation of astrophysical black holes. While there are only a few equations, there are several diagrams, many of them Penrose diagrams. This is the book if you want a thorough, correct, yet mostly non-mathematical introduction to Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates and want to have fun in the process. All topics are rather technical, yet the descriptions are both correct and easy to understand, with little mathematics. The chapters on white holes, wormholes, and Kerr black holes are particularly good. This is the best non-technical detailed introduction to the mathematical theory of black holes, a judgement which would probably stand even if there were others.