When I have a student who wants to learn a little relativity from a commercially published book, I usually suggest one of two books: Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics (for the mathematically adept) or Takeuchi (for others).
Here are my opinions on the pluses and minuses of Takeuchi:
Pro:
The physics is not obscured by equations that will be impenetrable to gen ed students.
The presentation is for the most part modern and geometical. This is a welcome antidote to outdated presentations that read as though they'd been written in 1935.
The problems seem good on casual inspection.
Con:
The presentation of the distinction between SR and GR is out of date. Takeuchi presents this using Einstein's original formulation in terms of inertial versus noninertial frames of reference, whereas modern physicists think of it as a distinction between flat spacetime and curved spacetime.
p. 92 - "This conservation of spacetime area maintains the symmetry between the tree- and car-frames, since each is moving at the exact same speed when observed from the other frame, and ensures that the correspondence between the points on the two diagrams is one-to-one." This is totally wrong. A one-to-one function from a plane to a plane need not conserve area. There are valid elementary arguments for conservation of area in the x-t plane, but this is not such an argument.
The second half of the book is not as lucid as the first. Takeuchi develops the "mass-momentum vector" in Newtonian mechanics; this seems like an awkward way to approach the topic, and is more abstract than pictures of world-lines. His target audience has never been exposed to 3-vectors. When he discusses the energy-momentum vector in SR, he drifts toward a higher level of math.
The other book to consider for this audience would be Mermin's It's About Time, which strikes me as more rigorous and less inviting.
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