Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 45
 Weak July 1, 2008
E. Hauser (SHARON, MA USA)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
If you are looking for guidance on metrics presentation or insight, pass right by this book. The pictures are nice enough I suppose; but there are many, many, and I mean many, other books, Tufte's included, that are significantly more worthwhile.
 The least of the Four Books June 20, 2008
D. R. Pitts (Fairfield, CA United States)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book does not hold up in comparison to the first 3 from Tuft. This appears to be made up of a number of unconnected papers. The most important in my opinion is the introduction of sparklines. It's worthwhile to revisit Minard, The inclusion of the work on Powerpoint is OK, but the inclusion of Tufte artworks/sculptures seemed a little self serving and left me confused as to the point. The production qualities of the book are superb, but the content inconsistent
 Flawed June 14, 2008
Richard J. Wagner (Washington, DC USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I am a big fan of Edward Tufte and his previous books. So I was excited when I was given this new book last year. Unfortunately it took a full year to work through it since it's full of bad writing, redundant graphics, boring topics, and pet jargon.
The text is just very dense, filled with lists of terms when the author wants to be sure he covers the bases: "The analysis of cause and effect, initially bivariate, quickly becomes multivariate through such necessary elaborations as the conditions under which the causal relation holds, interaction effects, multiple causes, multiple effects, causal sequences, source of bias, spurious correlation, sources of measurement error, competing variables, and whether the alleged cause is merely a proxy or a marker variable."
He also falls in love with his own jargon: depedestalization, PP, Phluff, pitch culture, economisting. The book has a few typos, which suggests that he couldn't get an editor to stomach proofreading the whole thing.
Much of the material in this book was already presented in sections of his other books and pamphlets: Minards map of the French invasion of Russia, chartjunk, loss of shuttles due to Powerpoint bullets, sparklines, cognitive styles of Powerpoint.
One really annoying habit is that when a graphic is discussed on more than one page, it is reprinted on each of those pages. The Minard map appears six times, at different scales and positions! At other times the graphics are plopped across the crease between pages.
If you've never read Tufte's other books you might learn something from this one, but most of it is presented better elsewhere.
 A worthwhile read, if you have time to take it all in... May 26, 2008
G. Byatt (Sydney, Australia)
Beautiful Evidence
The book goes to great lengths to explain the power and impact of visual imagery on the human mind. This type of psychological information can be valuable for many people in many different fields of expertise. The amount that it covers can be a bit over-bearing if you want to look at specifics to your own specific requirement, best to let it "wash over you" and distill out the key elements of interest afterwards. An interesting book...
 Great for the Undergraduate Classroom May 22, 2008
fortunetta (WA, United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Edward Tufte is a Yale political scientist turned information architect who brings 1500 years of analytic design together (including the histories of science and art) to create a very unique presentation that ET delivers in person each year to packed houses in large cities. He is known for his intense criticism of PowerPoint and his work on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that catapulted him to fame alongside Richard P. Feynmann, who said [about the Challenger Disaster], "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled (p.168)."
Beautiful Evidence has nine chapters (Mapped Pictures; Sparklines; Links and Causal Arrows; Words, Numbers Images; Fundamental Principles of Analytic Design; Corruption in Evidence Presentations; Cognitive Style of PowerPoint; Sculptural Pedestals; and Landscape Sculptures) and, although all of the chapters are not uniformly strong (notably Sparklines and both of the Sculptures), two of them (Fundamental Principles and Corruption) are better than anything you could find anywhere else. It's content that you would want undergraduates to take away with them.
Beautiful Evidence is Tufte's greatest hits volume and last year I used it to teach table and figure making and even paper writing to undergraduate Digital Technology and Culture majors at Washington State University, emphasizing practice rather than theory. As in each of Tufte's books, figures, tables, maps, cartoons, paintings, photos, and illustrations from 1500 years of human history stand alongside one another to illustrate such design principles as to escape flatland by adding scales, diagrams, overlays, numbers, words, and images to make "mapped pictures" to document and present evidence, to skillfully use arrows to suggest cause, and to show skepticism whenever stumbling onto official reports that use the passive voice or the bullet-list format (pp.142-3).
Although I had taught Tufte's Envisioning Information to undergraduates for years, there were lessons for me in bringing Beautiful Evidence to a group of undergraduates, as there seemed to be a minority that despised Tufte for his standards, his moral imperative that evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity, and his emphasis on historical precedent--in short, things that all educators and librarians hold dear. One student called it "a picture book for adults" that contained commonsense stuff that everyone knew. And, although there may be some truth here, the good thing about Tufte is that he is all about showing the design principles that the world doesn't have to reinvent but simply carry forward.
Additionally, Beautiful Evidence has (at least) two other bonuses for undergraduate students, its comparison of PowerPoint with other methods of presenting information and its utter skewering of a book that presents a study of artists' paintings and value (pp.148-9) that was published by a Cambridge, MA publisher. Both offer great Tufte lessons. Energized undergraduates will argue against Tufte's condemnation of PowerPoint by saying that it is a more dynamic tool than Tufte makes it out to be because the "pitch" has a place in modern life. Tufte's skillful analysis of the study of artist's paintings (that illustrates a new term, economisting, with accents on the con and mist) will seem even more amazing after checking the book out over Amazon to discover all the favorable reviews associated with it.
Whether Beautiful Evidence is an introduction to Edward Tufte's work or simply the latest in a successful string of four books, readers will find something of interest. New readers will discover an explosion of beautiful, colorful-but-integrated content and seasoned readers will find what has come to be Tufte's style: a minimalist, no-nonsense text where the references are elevated to a place of honor along the right-hand side of the page and the images take center stage.
Showing reviews 6-10 of 45
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