Generally speaking, the student or reader who wants to become literate in physics is offered only one path: he or she must follow the same time-honored sequence of courses followed by generations of professional scientists. Always mechanics comes first, followed usually by heat, electricity and magnetism, light, and, as a savory, a little ``modern physics.'' This may be ideal for those students who plan to become physicists, but for many others it seems an impassible desert. Nor is their feeling unreasonable. We physicists are an odd lot, taking great pleasure in the calculations we learn to do in the standard sequence of physics courses: calculations of the collisions of billiard balls, the flow of electric currents in wires, the paths of light rays in a telescope. It just is not reasonable to expect all students or readers to feel this way, any more than we could expect those who never plan to play the piano to enjoy practicing scales. It seems to me that it is this problem of motivation that presents the greatest obstacle when one tries to write for nonscientists about the fundamentals of physics.