Books like Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci

Despite the size of this book (a smaller hardback just brushing 300 pages) and despite my earnest attempt to devote time to it (as necessitated by reading it for a final project for math class), it seemed to take forever to get through it. And I cheated. I found this a frustrating narrative. I was enthralled by the personal and professional details regarding Leonardo but skimmed through pages of math far beyond my comprehension. I don't pretend to be anywhere near competent in math but I've discovered in this class that, given time and a good teacher, I can understand concepts pretty well. This book seems to market itself (and is categorized in the library) primarily as biographical, then art, then science. This made me approach it feeling like, sure, there's going to be some math in here and I'm going to have to deal with that but sort of assumed (to my fault) that given the apparent mainstream targeting that it would be at least comprehensible. About a quarter of the way through, despite reading examples multiples times in an attempt to understand them, I began to believe that even my mathematically and scientifically minded friends would have some difficulty following it. This made it more difficult to understand the general concept of the golden ratio and at about page 200, I put the book down, went to Wikipedia, and understood the whole concept better just by reading the first paragraph on that page. Also, it feels really cobbled together. For the second half, I skimmed through it, looking for the pertinent parts I needed for my project and details about Leonardo, which I always find fascinating. I get the sense that the author is a great artist and a great scientist and probably even a very good writer but the book seemed like he worked on different parts of the whole - concepts and historical aspects linked to both Leonardo and the golden ratio - but then just kind of them threw them together instead of forming a more comprehensive narrative. I found myself reading things towards the end about which I kept thinking, "Well, why didn't he explain that earlier?"I think dumbed down a bit for a more general audience and with a better editor for the general map of the book, this book would have found a wider audience. If I had picked it up for the Leonardo aspect alone as pleasure reading and not for primarily a school project, I would have abandoned it far earlier. As it was, I still couldn't bring myself to read the whole second half. I'm glad the book was written; I love reading books that combine two of my pleasures - art and science - it just feels like it could have been better executed.