Avner Ash

I understood it up to chapter 12, and found that fascinating. After that I gradually lost the plot until it had vanished completely at chapter 19. I skim-read the book after that. I really liked the infectious way the authors explain the "amazing" concepts, but found it annoying in the latter tough stages of the book that they would slip in a explanation of something trivial amongst the advanced maths.

As a high school student, I found that this book struck an admirable balance between explaining in detail the simple concepts and explaining in essence the sweep of grand theorems. I will likely reread parts of this book for gems to contemplate.

Enjoyable, technical treatment of a fragment of modern number theory involving group representations, Galois theory, elliptic curves, reciprocity laws, and other esoterica that went into the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. "Popular"-level, but by three-quarters of the way through I had reached conceptuo-abstractional overload.

Pretty technical for a math book in a public library. Currently, I'm holding two books by Eli Maor, which are just technical enough, so I'm letting this one go for now.