The Joy of Abstraction

This is a hard to review book. But the fact that I got through it, unlike any of the other ten category theory books on my shelf, I suppose is a good endorsement. I was keeping up entirely until full/faithful functors, and the remainder of the book washed over me, but I persisted on for at least a tour of the vibes.

However, the book itself is perplexing. Who is it written for? The first hundred pages give off a vibe of “math for people who have been traumatized by math” while the last hundred go hard into the paint. While I appreciated that the book doesn't use examples from math, the examples it chooses are POLITICALLY CHARGED and therefore EXTREMELY DISTRACTING. For the most part they're fine, but it does seem wildly unnecessary to add the parenthetical in excerpts like this:

> Now consider some other object x in the category. We're going to show that x “can't tell the difference” between a and b because whatever relationships x has with a, it has the same system of relationships with b. This is quite a deep idea, and is a bit like how I tell people apart, if I'm going to be honest. A lot of people look the same as each other to me in terms of physical appearance (especially white men) and I can only tell them apart via personal interaction with them.

I dunno man. There's a lot of this sort of thing and it all feels unnecessary and a bit gross. It's not enough to prevent me from recommending this book, but it's certainly not a strong recommendation.