My wife and I got "Wine for Dummies" and have learned a whole heck of a lot, and bought some wines we would never have bought otherwise, and which we greatly enjoyed.

Part of the problem with many fields is that they develop a very convoluted and inward-looking terminology, so that if you don't know the vocabulary going in, most of the books you pick up will read like Linear B. The great thing about the "dummies"/"idiots" books is that they write them in jargon-free English, so that somebody without any special training/brainwashing/zombification can still read and profit from them.

Alex