Here are some books I have recently found at Amazon.Com.
Kip Thorn has a book 'Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's outrageous legacy'. which came out in 1995. It is probably written for the general public. Its cost is $16.50. Kip is an expert in general relativity, so if he is also a good writer for popularizing science, you will have the most authoritative explanation for what black holes are all about. The book is 5 years old and probably does not capture any of the recent excitement about gamma ray bursts and the discovery of super massive black holes in galactic cores.
There is a technical book by Stuart Shapiro and Saul Teukolsky, 'Black Holes, White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars: The physics of compact objects at a cost of $125.00. These are professional astrophysicists, and they have written the book for the technical audience. I use it myself quite a bit and it is very well written, but perhaps a bit out of date since it was published in 1983 before gamma ray bursts were fully understood and the massive work by the Hubble Space Telescope made 'supermassive black holes' a commonplace idea.
There is a third book called 'Black Holes, Worm Holes and Time Machines by Jim Al-Khalili for $16.50. I do not recognize the author as an astronomer but you will have to read the dust jacket to see just what the book is about.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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