Professor Filippenko begins the class suddenly and with great enthusiasm, asking students how many of them had seen the recent eclipse, and gently chiding those who hadn’t. He is dressed, as they guess, as a black hole for the day. Filippenko combines a casual tone and humor with serious, detailed science. The powerpoint slides are helpful and clear, not cluttered. Sometimes humor is incorporated into the slides, and sometimes it’s spontaneous. Flippenko’s examples are worth noting. For instance, instead of talking abstractly about an object falling into a black hole, he talks about watching a friend fall into a black hole—what the friend would see and what we, as observers, would see. References and examples range widely, appealing to students at all levels, from a line from Dante’s Inferno “Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” to ending the lecture with part of a Simpson’s episode, “Homer Cubed,” about black holes.