My assumption going into this book was that the author would use physical reasoning to make higher mathematical concepts clearer and more accessible. It's a great idea: Gauss' Law in 2D can be imagined as a spreading puddle of oil, of course!

Instead you get a mess of contrived analogies that are literary Rube Goldberg devices at best and not applicable at worst. The author would spend pages upon pages setting up these exercises and, though some were well done (like where to park in a drive-in to maximize your movie field of view), most were too ambitious to succeed.

What really killed me though was that after each hypothetical mechanical system was laboriously hammered together to elucidate some rather simple math concept, the author would provide a more rigorous mathematical proof which was always so much more valuable than the brittle physical analogies.

All in all, it's an interesting idea and a book worth borrowing from the library.