As a kid, I was good at math, but only in the sense of manipulating numbers and following directions -- I never conceptually got it, and I've always regretted that. I picked this up at the library on a whim, hoping it would appeal to my inner liberal arts major and get me excited about the concepts, history, and elegance behind mathematics.

All in all, the book does just that. Bentley writes witty, conversational prose, especially when it comes to the lives of mathematicians and the cultural history of math. As someone who hasn't taken a math class in over 20 years, I DID have a hard time following some of the more detailed/technical concepts, but a lot of those are in blue boxes as a sidebar, so you could skip them if it gets to be too much.