Do you remember the title or author of that book?
That's a book that deliberately starts out with the silliest possible model and then gradually introduces more and more sophisticated models until the book runs out of pages or your head explodes, whichever comes first. ;)
An important insight, however, is that the simple models are incredibly useful. When I was a teenager I used to fret that the teachers were showing me the simple models first because they were fools, or because they thought we were fools. But it turns out that they are doing so to call attention to certain important general features without distracting you with irrelevant detail.
My favorite class in all of science was Roald Hoffman's chemistry class, the highest numbered class in the Cornell chemistry department, a class which represented the point where chemistry and physics merge to become the same subject. And Hoffman deliberately used a relatively simple model of molecule-molecule interactions in a solid, the Hückel model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hückel_method
Moreover, Hoffman would communicate in pictures as much as in math.
I don't mind simplified incorrect models so long as they're presented that way (so I don't want to read a "all that stuff we just covered? Yeah it's wrong"-ish sentence after the fact) and the full truth is eventually revealed in an understandable way. I want a full picture of something, not a partial incorrect picture of something, it scares me that some people never stop thinking of an atom as a small planetary system.
It's a very specific book, but it does explain for example why you can assume that only electrons at the Fermi energy contribute to transport phenomena (aka "current").
I guess for somebody not into mesoscopic transport, only the first three or four chapters will be of interested. But for my diploma thesis (which ended too badly to link it here) it was a real live safer.