- does that book explain why the reader needs to be "gifted"?
I haven't heard of that book. I like Zee's "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell" for a breezy introduction to the subject, and * *love* Huang's "Quarks, Leptons and Gauge Fields" for a solid intro to the Standard Model with a bare minimum of quantum field theory.
If you're interested in grand unified theories, this paper is the easiest introduction I know:
John Baez and John Huerta, The algebra of grand unified theories, https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1556
it won a prize for expository writing from the American Mathematical Society, so it may not be just my immodesty that makes me think this.
