Arthur Miller's Empire of the Stars tells the story of the ideas leading up to the scientific acceptance of black holes, largely through the biography of the Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (commonly known as ‘Chandra’). It is compellingly and engagingly written, and the biographical structure helps give immediacy to often highly abstract concepts. Its readability hides some frustrating flaws, however.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, and by far the longest and most detailed, presents Chandra's young life and earlier scientific work on white dwarf stars. It includes interesting coverage of his experience as an Indian in Cambridge, useful introductions to the major figures in British astrophysics, and an overview of the study of stellar structure at the time. But the bulk of the text – 152 of 264 pages – is squarely on Chandra's battles with Arthur S. Eddington, to which I will return. The second section examines how the further study of stellar evolution after the Second World War was closely bound up with nuclear weapons development. The material here is quite interesting, and Miller reveals many intriguing links between astrophysics and military fusion research. The final section describes the emergence of consensus that black holes were physically plausible entities, as well as Chandra's own research in general relativity, and his thinking on beauty, art and aesthetics. The book closes with two appendices that present current scientific information on white dwarf stars and supernovae.

Empire of the Stars is certainly the best major work available on Chandra, but it often lacks critical perspective. For example, Miller relies too heavily on Chandra's and his widow's accounts and interpretations of events. This often results in Chandra being portrayed as a misunderstood genius. We are rarely given an understanding of why his rivals thought as they did; instead, anyone who was not persuaded by Chandra's work was trapped in their ‘preconceived notions’ (p. 13). Furthermore, the narrative sometimes feels presentist, with historical figures chided for not making the jump from Chandra's calculation of a maximum mass for white dwarf stars to the existence of black holes, despite few compelling reasons to do so; the implications of that calculation were certainly not obvious at the time (even to Chandra).

These difficulties are on display with particular starkness in the account of the famous debates of 1935 in which Eddington strongly rejected Chandra's work. As Miller notes, Chandra spent the rest of his life retelling this story from his perspective to anyone who would listen, and unfortunately his version is simply repeated again here. Chandra felt that he had been unfairly singled out and persecuted by Eddington for irrational, probably racist, reasons, and Miller presents those feelings as reality. He tells us that Eddington chose ‘to savage Chandra's result cynically and unmercifully’ (p. xviii) and acted from ‘sheer mean-spirited duplicity’ (p. 108). For Eddington's motivations he suggests that Chandra's work ‘threatened to topple [Eddington's] fragile psychological balance’ and that ‘a healthy dose of colonialism’ (p. 147) was involved too.

It is unclear why we are to think Eddington was psychologically unbalanced, and the suggestion of Eddington's racist motivations is completely unsubstantiated. Miller provides only a vague sense of British colonial attitudes and does not link them to Eddington in any way. Indeed, Eddington is a strange figure to personify imperial ideology – as a Quaker he was a committed internationalist and a vocal critic of national stereotypes, and even spent several years as president of the National Peace Council, whose primary goal was to secure better treatment for Indians within the British Commonwealth. Indeed, Eddington and Chandra appeared to remain on genial terms for the rest of their lives, and the senior astronomer supported Chandra for numerous posts and awards – unlikely acts for someone driven by racist hatred. Also, the context of Eddington's mystical and philosophical views is invoked strangely – his focus on the fine structure constant is attributed to Kabbalistic analyses of scripture, a religious practice as far removed from his liberal Quakerism as is imaginable.

As it stands, Miller provides us with plenty of material for understanding the 1935 debate without recourse to vague speculations of ‘colonialism’. He notes correctly that Eddington was famously vigorous in intellectual debate, and despite Chandra's personal recollection there is no evidence that his treatment of the younger man was any different from what was meted out to other rivals (for instance, James Jeans and E. A. Milne). Miller documents the debates among all these figures very accurately; Eddington's attacks on Chandra simply do not stand out as unusual. The author even gives a simpler and much more persuasive motivation for these attacks: Chandra's theories were incompatible with Eddington's own attempts to marry relativity and quantum physics. Chandra's lifelong obsession with these events is best explained not by his being the victim of racism (of which he suffered plenty elsewhere), but simply by the emotional trauma of a sensitive young man having his ideas rejected by an intellectual hero. His ability to imagine slights from his colleagues appears throughout the book, even manifesting in his failure to feel that the Nobel Prize was adequate recognition for his work.

Most of the book's attention is focused on Chandra's early career, which results in the later chapters on supernovae and black holes feeling a bit rushed. These later chapters deal with extremely rich material on the novel ties between astrophysics and weapons research, and show how even a modern discipline, by definition far removed from earthly concerns, can be powerfully dependent on its social context. This section (entitled ‘Stars and bombs’) could have been the core of a complete monograph itself.

Empire of the Stars seems to be aimed at a popular-science audience, which sometimes results in a break from the historical narrative for lengthy technical exposition. Historians may also be frustrated by the occasional neglect of existing historical scholarship. The book is, however, a useful contribution to the story of general relativity's post-war renaissance, in addition to contextualizing post-war astrophysics and providing the best full treatment available on Chandrasekhar's life and work.