Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 16-20 of 147
 Pretentious, underedited, vacuous drivel July 23, 2009
macbheatha
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
Most self-help books are bloated, underedited and self-indulgent.
Most business books are bloated, underedited, and self-indulgent.
So it's no surprise that this self-help business book is underedited, bloated, and self-indulgent. We have, in Chapter 8, 2 pages of rambling on samurai swordsmanship as an analogy for...what exactly? This meandering style of writing is a disservice to the reader and undermines the thesis of the book. This is a magazine article grown obese.
Two stars for teh pretteee pictures.
 Mostly fluff, but still great July 19, 2009
Phillip Schwarzmann (Espoo, Finland)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you're familiar with the elements of elegent design, simplicity, minimalism etc...you'll get the idea of this book very quickly. It bangs at that one main point, and the rest is fluff.
But it's a beautiful book with lots of examples and is a treat to read and skim through before you're next PowerPoint creation.
 Good concepts; ironically, book misses its own ideals July 12, 2009
P. Constable (Redmond, WA USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I like the design principles and process tools that are provided in Presentation Zen: those are definitely usable and useful, and if I were rating on the book only on the learnings I came away with, I'd give it higher marks.
But I felt I really had to dock marks because of my experience with the book: I found it quite ironic that, for me, the book really failed in the very goals the author says we should have for our presentations: content that is engaging and is clear.
I was quite surprised to find this book non-engaging: for me, it has been a slog to work through. Typically I can read only part of a chapter before I wanted to put it down. I don't normally read like that, and I can usually get through a book like this within a few days, but it has taken me weeks to endure just the first half!
At first, that left me puzzled: The book has visual appeal; the chapters aren't overly long and there are only ten of them; why can't just get through them? The probable reason came to me in reading the chapter "Simplicity: Why it matters": the author really fails at his own ideals of simplicity. Not in the visual design; the visual design of the book is good in this respect. Rather, he fails to keep the written content simple. That very chapter on simplicity made this apparent to me. Let me explain.
He starts with two pages introducing the topic: simplicity really means clarity: getting the essense of the message and presenting that in a way that's clear for the intended audience -- and a key to that is eliminating the non-essential (simplicity). So far, so good.
Then he spends two pages using a comparison of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as illustration. Now, I'm not convinced that the stereotypes of these two are fully valid, and maybe that was a factor, but overall these two pages really added nothing to my understanding of the author's message. In other words, for me that was two pages of non-essential content that only distracted and detracted from the author's message.
The next sub-section is six pages long. The last page is well done and simply has a quotation that is relevant to the author's message: "By stripping an image to essential meaning, the artist can amplify that meaning..." (Scott McCloud). But that was preceded by five redundant and somewhat-tedious pages:
The sub-section starts with a discussion of three Japanese concepts: kanso (simplicity), shizen (naturalness) and shibumi (elegance). But the discussion of shizen really just re-iterates the need for simplicity: the recurring theme in that portion is restraint; naturalness is never mentioned after the opening sentence. (Along the way, he introduces another Japanese term "miegakure" without explaining it -- more distracting content that added nothing meaningful for me.) After that is a full-page discussion of elegance, and that was just more elaboration on simplicity (good taste can be attained in restraint). Then there are two more pages ("Wabi-Sabi Simplicity") in which the author further reiterates the less-is-more idea.
That's followed by a page with a side-bar anecdote that I found pretty silly: it leads to a nonsensical conclusion that a fish shop doesn't need any sign to advertise and identify itself. (More useful would have been a discussion of pros and cons for different signs.)
So, six pages on "kanso", "shizen" and "shibumi" that I found highly redundant with many paragraphs of text that added nothing new to the message. I think that has been typical of my experience in the book so far, and the reason I've found it a slog: there's been a lot of content that adds nothing to the message.
Like the bullets of text on slides that the author wants to steer us away from.
How ironic!
In part, I think the author's obvious interest in Zen and in Japanese culture may be contributing to this problem in the book. He wants to include elements of Zen and Japanese throughout the book because they interest his and because they relate to _his_ understanding of simplicity, clarity and elegance. But it seems to me that he failed to apply his own recommendations of going through a process to understand the audience and to tailor the presentation in a way that will get across his core message to them -- including elminating non-essentials. His core message is not about Zen or about Japanese culture (and if those are topics you want to read about, you can find much better books than this). His core message is about something else, and excessive incorporation of these other themes is, at least for me, a distraction.
In summary, then, I found the book to have some really useful ideas on creating presentations, but that they are presented in a way that really misses the mark in the very goals it strives for. I can readily imagine that Reynolds does live presentations on the same topic that are excellent and highly effective, but for me this written presentation is neither of those things. I'd give a buy rating for the usefulness of the ideas but with this strong caveat for the written presentation. (It's the first book on the topic I've read, so I don't have better alternate suggestions.)
 Presentation Zen July 5, 2009
Danny G. Nobles (Columbia, SC)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I would like to have had this book when we were preparing presentations in the Pentagon. Reynolds provides practical methods for organizing thoughts and presenting ideas in ways to strike and keep an audience's attention. Good insights for marketing presentations, academic oral defenses, or classrooms. If you would like to make attractive, relevant, and memorable visual presentations then you should read this book.
A new paradigm July 2, 2009
Bonnie Urquhart Gruenberg (Duncannon, Pa)
Presentation Zen shifts your thinking about presentations. It is a well designed, quick to read book, but the effect is transformative. And it stays with you - I read it months ago and still remember many of the points and visuals.
Showing reviews 16-20 of 147
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