Reddit mentions of The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis

If you'd like to learn more about linguistics, I often recommend Pavey's "The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis". It goes over a myriad of syntactic and phonetic phenomena in language structure with easy to follow definitions, example data and exercises. If you're really dead set on books for a general audience, then maybe Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World", might appeal to you as a tie in for this thread's topic concerning the historical development of PIE into the early IE languages. It was written by a anthropologist, and also concerns cultural development in early eastern Europe/Eurasia. If you want more accounts from field linguists like Everett, then Dixon's "Searching for Aboriginal Languages" and Robinson's "Microphone in the Mud" will be up your alley. If you'd like to learn about the recent history of linguistics as a field and what hypothesis are contentious and what rival schools of thought exist, then Harris's "The Linguistics Wars" is a great account of all that.

As for your second question, I, like many others here, would have no problem re-explaining our answers with a less technical audience in mind, if asked to do so. Just tag me as 'will reexplain linguistics stuff if asked'. :)