I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. this is a fascinating book about the very first stars that is somewhat easy to understand.

Disclaimer: I would like to thank the author and publisher for providing an advanced review copy of this book.

Emma Chapman details the latest research in the study of the very first stars of the Universe that have been until recently hidden to us. From the first few minutes after the Big Bang to hundreds of millions of years, the Universe entered the Dark Ages as the first stars in the cosmos were formed and darkness finally gave way to light.
Since astronomy uses the light we receive from the corners of the Universe to study it, this period of darkness represents a challenge for the researchers to study, but it is of the utmost importance to cosmologists to breach this gap in knowledge paramount to the understanding of the stars and galaxies formed today.

This book is very unique and interesting, I would add a disclaimer though that there are a lot of physics concepts: cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics, and even some nuclear astrophysics knowledge are needed in order to fully explain this research.
As such, it is not an easy book for the general public, but the author's simple analogies and humour makes it so much easier to understand it all !

This book...

...was stellar.

I would apologize for the dad-level joke, but I don't feel like Emma Chapman would want me to do that. Please understand that it is the highest compliment when I say the humor in this book is all puns and dad jokes, and that I could not have possibly enjoyed it more.

But isn't this a science book?, I hear you asking.

Yes. Yes it is. And that's why it's perfect.

First Light is an exploration of the oldest stars in the universe, stars that burned only hydrogen and helium, never becoming the metal-producing lights in the sky that we're all so familiar with, even if we don't know that we're familiar with. First Light is a journey back in time and space to the origins of stellar bodies that, through their deaths, made our universe what it is today. If only we could find them (spoilers: we have not).

It also contains the most hilarious periodic table of all time.

I sincerely hope that Chapman's first book is not her only one, though I'm happy to say I was here at the beginning, able to find this very first star. Or... five. Five stars.

In First Light, Emma Chapman covers the earliest eras of the universe’s existence, particularly focusing on what astronomers, due to their lack of information, call the “Dark Ages”, from about 380, 000 years to one billion years after the Big Bang occurred. Even more specifically, her interest lies with the creation of the first stars and the current attempt to find out more about them.

Despite the focus, Chapman manages to bring in a host of other astronomical discoveries/investigations: the Cosmic Microwave background, inflation, dark matter, space telescopes, radio astronomy, Fast Radio Bursts, black holes, the Great Oxygenation Event, and others. She also goes on a variety of non-astronomical tangents involving King Tut’s tomb and pigeons (yes, pigeons).

Chapman does an excellent job explaining some complicated science here in lucid, easy to follow prose. Several times I wrote in my notes “excellent explanation” or “best explanation of this I’ve read,” as with her explanation of plasma (“like a gas consisting of tiny magnets, forever attracting and repelling each other”) or the creation of dark matter halos and filaments. Equally as good as her descriptions of individual concepts is the way she ends each chapter with a concise, simplified summary of the chapter’s points, allowing the reader to solidify that knowledge and thus have it in hand to build on for the next. All of this done via an engaging, conversational tone peppered with personal asides, pop culture references (“If you don’t know where TARDIS is from, go download Doctor Who and rejoice”), smiley faces in an illustration, and some fun-to-read footnotes.

My only issues with First Light are that while some of the tangents are interesting and amusing, others merely interrupt with little benefit. And several times Chapman’s metaphors similarly interrupt the flow without really illuminating the subject matter and at times even perhaps adding some unneeded complication. Examples include a lengthy tangent on King Tut or an analogy between star size and human height distributions. That noted, I can sympathize with Chapman, as the analogy is typically the best way to explain difficult concepts to a lay audience, and it is not easy to come up with one that hasn’t been used before.

If First Light lacks the stylistic excellence of my favorite popular science authors, it remains an excellent example of the genre: clear, informative, concise without sacrificing important information or being overly dense, engaging throughout with a sense of personality and a sense of a personal curiosity and commitment. I hope Chapman writes others.

What I really appreciated about this book is how accessible the writing was. I'm someone who has a large interest in astronomy and astrophysics, but doesn't have the physics background to be able to understand most writings about it. Chapman was able to successfully break down complex physics into terms that I was able to understand. In addition, the writing was humorous and quirky. I also thought it was the perfect length. It was long enough that I felt like I got a decent survey the topic, but not too long to the point where it felt like a chore reading it.

Disclaimer: I would like to thank the author and publisher for providing an advanced review copy of this book.

Firstlight by Emma Chapman is a unique and valuable astrophysics book. It is unique in that the author introduces and discusses the technical material in a light-hearted fashion with anecdotes and humorous observations to make a typically dry field come alive as the reader understands the humans behind the research. It is valuable not only because of some of the excellent advice regarding black holes and spaghettification ("Do not fall into a black hole."), but the author also clearly describes the latest findings on humanity's understanding of the development of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the formation of complex galaxies. As this is a rapidly changing field, any reader interested in astronomy who is not an active astrophysicist will certainly learn from the author's descriptions of the latest research on dark matter, black holes and quasars, the historical temperature of the universe, massive radio telescope arrays, space based telescopes, the formation of the first stars and galaxies, and more.

An an amateur enthusiast interested in astronomy and a variety of fields of science, I was surprised at how out-of-date my understanding was regarding dark matter and the history of the universe. In addition to the theories on the development of the universe, it was interesting to read about the various tools that researchers use and will use to further our understanding. From algorithms to tease out information from existing radio telescope data, to the ongoing development of massive radio telescopes arrays on Earth, to ultra sensitive systems that measure gravity waves, to the James Webb Space Telescope to be placed in Lagrange Point L2, to plans for radio telescope arrays on the far side of the moon, etc, this book is full of details on how scientists directly learn about and explore the cosmos around us.

I definitely recommend this book to readers interested in learning the latest about our understanding of the formation of the cosmos. And, I would like to nominate this book for an award for the best use of the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in technical jargon.

I read a lot of "popular" astrophysics books so I know what's out there and I have to be honest and say this one falls squarely in the middle. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. The subject is said to be early stellar evolution but there is a significant amount of context given on the rest of the universe (Big Bang to present) that the focus is much larger. I didn't see a lot of new ground being covered but I will give the author credit for trying to write with a friendly, chatty style. Good intro to the topic if you're new to it, probably not what you're looking for if you're not.