Sure, that's why Graham Hutton can do it in one chapter. Most books discuss lists and functions anyway, and from there is not such a big step to give an introduction to lambdas/closures, maps, folds, and filters.

It's not as if we are discussing monads (which are also easy to understand, given a good teacher).

Doubt it. He may have used a chapter of text to explain something, but who he explained it to probably could understand it in a chapter of text.