Culture
Book Review: ‘A Crack in Everything,’ by Marcus Chown
A CRACK IN EVERYTHING: How Black Holes Came In From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage, by Marcus Chown
When writing about the complexities of our universe, the astronomer turned author Marcus Chown goes straight to the deep end. His book, “A Crack in Everything,” tells the stories of scientists on the quest to demystify black holes, and it starts with Albert Einstein’s counterintuitive description of gravity.
That gravity is a force — some invisible pull attracting your pencil to the floor — is an illusion, Einstein suggested. What we perceive as gravity is instead the warping of space and time around a massive object, like how plopping a bowling ball onto a soft mattress will curve the sheets surrounding it.
It was a revelation that completely upended the way physicists thought about the universe. But, Chown explains, it also led to a horrifying realization. If that massive object was squeezed small enough, like a star that has run out of fuel and collapsed under its own weight, the warping around it would grow so steep and so powerful that the object would simply cease to exist. Einstein’s new theory of gravity, known as general relativity, gave birth to a monster that he never escaped: the black hole, a cosmic entity with the mass of millions or billions of suns that will devour anything in its wake.
“They are the stuff of physicists’ nightmares,” Chown writes, the afterlives of too-big, burned-out stars swallowed by their own gravity, creating an infinitely dense pit of who-knows-what, because in the belly of a black hole, the laws of physics just stop making sense. As the author concludes, “No wonder Einstein never believed in black holes.”
Chown’s book is primarily a chronicle of the researchers who helped make black holes believable, not just for the Einsteins but for everyone else. He has plumbed the historical record and conducted interviews with pioneers like the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr and the British astronomer Paul Murdin, weaving into the stories of their lives and work the uncanny mechanics of the invisible bête noire they helped reveal.
At times, Chown’s writing is downright poetic. Two black holes “locked in a death spiral,” he writes, “launched a tsunami of tortured space-time” — gravitational waves that reverberated across the cosmos and, notably in 2015, into the detectors of eagerly awaiting astronomers on Earth, direct proof that black holes exist. But elsewhere, Chown’s scientific descriptions are difficult to follow, even dizzying. How does the average reader comprehend, for example, that inside a black hole, “space and time become so distorted that they effectively swap places”?
The best parts of “A Crack in Everything” lie between the passages of scientific flair, where Chown brings the heroes of physics past alive. We see Karl Schwarzschild of the Schwarzschild radius, the equation describing the size of a black hole, making his discovery while suffering from painful, chronic skin blisters as a soldier in World War I. Years later, we glimpse Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of the Chandrasekhar limit, a way to identify the stars that might someday become black holes, doing his calculations by starlight on the deck of a steamship bound for Cambridge, his mind ranging “freely among the embers of dying suns.”
Each chapter in the first half of the book introduces one or two protagonists to root for on their way to the next big discovery. But as the knowledge develops, so too do the scientific instruments and methods, and the number of people needed to push the science forward balloons. By the 1990s it is impossible to keep track of all of the players involved, and Chown mostly abandons his main-character strategy. That does not, however, impact his ability to set up the stakes for each new breakthrough and detail all of the magic and mishaps that come with doing science.
It may be difficult to relate to the genius required to ponder cosmic enigmas. But Chown makes sure you empathize with the rush to get to publication first; the utter exhaustion of consecutive 16-hour night shifts at the observatory, piecing together the first picture of a black hole; and the despair that astronomers felt when the first images from the Hubble Space Telescope came back blurry.
Chown wants us to think a little more tenderly of black holes, too. They are not destructive monsters gobbling up everything in their vicinity, but rather passive predators, waiting for prey to fall their way. Nor are they always ominously black, but often “the most brilliant beacons in creation,” stirring up some of the brightest light in the universe as they feed. By the time you finish “A Crack in Everything” you will see black holes for what they really are: vibrant, spinning hearts around which star matter whirls, coaxing the growth of galaxies and forming a path for the emergence of planets, even life itself.
A CRACK IN EVERYTHING: How Black Holes Came In From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage | By Marcus Chown | Apollo | 334 pp. | $30
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
new video loaded: The A.I. threat to audiobooks
By Alexandra Alter, Léo Hamelin and Laura Salaberry
May 20, 2026
At 53, and after more than a decade in the industry, things are happening for the romance writer Kennedy Ryan that were not on her bingo card.
The most recent: a first look deal with Universal Studio Group that will allow her to develop various projects, including a Peacock adaptation of her breakout 2022 novel “Before I Let Go,” the first book in her Skyland trilogy, which considers love and friendship among three Black women in a community inspired by contemporary Atlanta.
With a TV series in development, Ryan — who published her debut novel in 2014 and subsequently self-published — joins Tia Williams and Alanna Bennett at a table with few other Black romance writers.
“What I am most excited about is the opportunity to identify other authors’ work, especially marginalized authors, and to shepherd those projects from book to screen,” said Ryan, a former journalist. (Kennedy Ryan is a pen name.) “We are seeing an explosion in romance adaptations right now, and I want to see more Black, brown and queer authors.”
Her latest novel, “Score,” is set to publish on Tuesday. It’s the second volume in her Hollywood Renaissance series, after “Reel,” about an actress with a chronic illness who falls for her director on the set of a biopic set during the Harlem Renaissance. The new book follows a screenwriter and a musician, once romantically involved, working on the same movie.
In a recent interview (edited and condensed for clarity), Ryan shared the highs and lows of commercial success; her commitment to happy endings; and her north star. Spoiler: It isn’t what readers think of her books on TikTok.
Your work has been categorized as Black romance, but how do you see yourself as a writer?
I see myself as a romance writer. I think the season that I’m in right now, I’m most interested in Black romance, and that’s what I’ve been writing for the last few years. It doesn’t mean that I won’t write anything else, because I don’t close those doors. But the timeline we’re in is one where I really want to promote Black love, Black art and Black history.
What intrigued you about the period of history you capture in the Hollywood Renaissance series?
I’ve always been fascinated by the Harlem Renaissance and the years immediately following. It felt like a natural era to explore when I was examining overlooked accomplishments by Black creatives. I loved the art as agitation and resistance seen in the lives of people like James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston, but also figures like Josephine Baker, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, who people may not think of as “revolutionary.” The fact that they were even in those spaces was its own act of rebellion.
What about that period feels resonant now?
The series celebrates Black art and Black history and love at a time when I see all three under attack. Our art is being diminished and our history is being erased before our very eyes. I don’t hold back on the relationship between what I see going on in the world and the books I write.
How does this moment in your career feel?
I didn’t get my first book deal until I was in my 40s, so I think this is the best job I’ve ever had. I’m wanting to make the most of it, not just for myself, but for other people, and I think the temptation is to believe that it will all go away because that’s my default.
Why would it all go away?
Part of it is because we — my family, my husband and I — have had some really hard times, especially early in our marriage when my son was diagnosed with autism, my husband lost his job, and we experienced hard times financially. I’ll never forget that.
When I say it could all go away, I mean things change, the industry changes, what people respond to changes, what people buy and want to consume changes. So I don’t assume that what I am doing is always going to be something that people want.
Why are you so firmly committed to defending the “happy ending” in romance novels?
It is integral to the definition of the genre that it ends happily. Some people will say it’s just predictable every one ends happily. I am fine with that, living in a world that is constantly bombarding us with difficulty, with hurt, with challenge.
I write books that are deeply curious about the human condition. In “Score,” the heroine has bipolar disorder, she’s bisexual, there’s all of this intersectionality. For me, there is no safer genre landscape to unpack these issues and these conditions because I know there is guaranteed joy at the end.
You have a pretty active TikTok account. How do you engage with reviews and commentary on the platform about you or the genre?
First of all, I believe that reader spaces are sacred. Sometimes I see authors get embroiled with readers who have criticized them. I never ever comment on critical reviews. I definitely do see the negative. It’s impossible for me not to, but I just kind of ignore it. I let it roll off.
How does this apply to being a very visible Black author in romance?
I am very cognizant of this space that I’m in right now, which is a blessing, and I don’t take it for granted. I see a lot of discourse online where people are like, “Kennedy’s not the only one,” “Why Kennedy?,” “There should be more Black authors.” And I’m like, Oh my God, I know that. I am constantly looking for ways to amplify other Black authors. I want to hold the door open and pull them along.
How do you define success for yourself at this point?
I have a little bit of a mission statement: I want to write stories that will crater in people’s hearts and create transformational moments. Whether it’s television or publishing, am I sticking true to what I feel like is one of the things I was put on this earth to do? I’m a P.K., or preacher’s kid. We’re always thinking about purpose. And for me, how do I fit into this genre? What is my lane? What is my legacy? Which sounds so obnoxious, you know, but legacy is very important to me.
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