Flash! is one of a pair of books released at similar times (The Biggest Bangs was the other) that tells the story of the discovery and attempt to understand gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray bursts are devastating explosions that occur quite frequently in the Universe (at least once a day) but are strange in that they emit nearly all of their energy in the difficult to observe gamma-ray region of the spectrum. For this reason, they were unknown until the late 1960s and that the ones we observe occur in the most distant galaxies wasn't proven to most people's satisfaction until the 1990s. There is still much that is not known about these events and it remains a very active field of study.
Flash! reads like a journalistic version of events. It is focused on the people who have made significant discoveries in the field and what they did. It does not cover the science of bursts in much detail and is much more focused on modern research rather than the significant amount of work that went into understanding bursts prior to 1990. While some of the personalities are interesting, I was disappointed in the book as a whole because I felt like I was reading an extremely long newspaper article (265 pages) that lacked any real depth. The book does have its better moments, for some reason, Don Lamb's description of how the launch failure of the HETE satellite was particularly haunting, but on the whole I thought that a better flavor of what burst research is like was given by Katz in The Biggest Bangs.
-Lyle Ford
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Lyle Ford
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Department of Physics and Astronomy
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Last Updated: December 23, 2003