TITLE: Number theory textbook based on the absolute Galois group?
QUESTION [29 upvotes]: I've just finished reading Ash and Gross's Fearless Symmetry, a wonderful little pop mathematics book on, among other things, Galois representations.  The book made clear a very interesting perspective that I wasn't aware of before: that a large chunk of number theory can be thought of as a quest to understand $G = \text{Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb{Q})$.  For example, part of the reason to study elliptic curves is to describe two-dimensional representations of $G$, and reciprocity laws are secretly about ways to describe the traces of Frobenius elements in various representations.  (That's awesome!  Why didn't anybody tell me that before?)
Are there number theory textbooks (presumably not introductory, but hopefully not too sophisticated either) which explicitly take this as a guiding principle?  I think this is a great idea to organize things like quadratic reciprocity around and I'm wondering if anybody has decided to actually do that at the undergraduate (or introductory graduate, maybe) level.
Edit:  In response to some comments and at least one downvote, most of the other questions on MO about the absolute Galois group that I can find are about the state of the art, and the references in them seem fairly sophisticated.  But it seems to me there are still interesting things to say along the lines of Fearless Symmetry, but directed to an undergraduate or introductory graduate-level audience as a kind of "second course in number theory."  I'm imagining a textbook like Serre's Course in Arithmetic.

REPLY [8 votes]: In the 1-dimensional case we are talking about class field theory, and I can't recall having seen anything better than Cox's book (already mentioned by Emerton) in this direction (undergrad etc.). With Artin's reciprocity law (the central role of the Frobenius elements in connection with reciprocity laws wasn't exactly kept secret 8-) under your belt you might want to check out

G. Shimura, A reciprocity in law in non-solvable extensions,
J. Reine Angew. Math. 221, 209-220 (1966)

and

J. Velu, Lois de reciprocite liees aux courbes elliptiques,
Semin. Delange-Pisot-Poitou, 14e annee 1972/73, Fasc. 1, 2, Expose 9, 5 p. (1973)

both of which are rather nice to read, and then continue with the articles by Serre and Swinnerton-Dyer that Emerton suggested (actually they were motivated by concrete problems concerning Ramanujan's $\tau$-function, and they've written quite a bit about it at the time).