Customer Reviews

The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I love this book - creative and thought provoking - Thank you.
A few of the pages alone are worth the price of the book - political left vs political right, creationism vs evolutionism, nature vs nurture. Access to the web site for updates is a great idea.

Suggestion for author's consideration: please clean up the errors and omissions. This should be a five star book. For example: the visually beautiful and useful index excludes several pages of the book; Pages 60 to 65 are missing a number of details. As a result, the pages make no sense.
My advice to the reader - wait for a revised edition or hope that someone replaces the printer.

This book's charts are very pretty to look at, but the quantative approach in many of them was so bad and so confusing that for the first 50 pages I thought I was reading a spoof.

On page 10, an area representing $21B is larger than one representing $27B, and $60B looks to be about half of $230B. On pages 60 - 65 the charts have no labels whatsoever, and so there's literally no way to tell what they're trying to say: it's just six pages of colorful polygons. You'll find these kinds of blunders on almost every page; I've just chosen a few early examples.

I know it seems like I'm nit-picking, but for a book claiming in its subtitle to be some kind of statistical "guide," such flaws are fatal. If you're at all interested in examples of beautifully presented and accurate information, please read Beautiful Evidence or The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition instead.

As pointed out in other reviews and in comments on the Website [...], there are mistakes in this book that make you question the validity of many of the graphs. There are incorrect figures and scaling errors. For example, why does an area representing $60B look about half as large as one for $230B?

I want to make it very clear that the approach to visualize information this way is excellent, but the author seems to have given priority to artistic expression rather than accuracy.

Also, there are labels missing on several pages, due to a technical fault. ([...]) I would wait for a new edition with corrections.

This book has such incredible potential, and is quite fascinating, but they obviously rushed it without editing it properly. There are many graphics with missing text, thus rendering them totally meaningless. I'm returning mine, hoping they will do a second edition with corrections. So very sad. Also, it is NOT a hardcover. The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia

Please be aware that this book is exactly the same as Information is Beautiful. Do not buy both, or you'll end up returning one of the two, as I'm going to do now.

On a cursory glance, The Visual Miscellaneum by David McCandless looks pretty good. The book covers a wide breath of topics and everything is very colourful. However, a more detailed inspection will reveal some serious errors in the visualizations the book contains.

Some of the data items within the information graphics have been intentionally left unlabeled. For example, "Sex Education" on page 62, presents a bar chart and the only entry that is labeled is Studio Art which has no students that are virgins. Having seen this chart before, the bar chart on page 62 emphasizes the original joke. In the introduction, McCandless asks "Can you make jokes in graphs?" Indeed you can, and this is a borderline ok example. However, the joke isn't clear if you haven't seen the original chart.

From here, it gets worse. The "Excuse Us: Reasons for Divorce" graphic on page 64 does not have any labels on any of the items in the graphic. Where is the actual content? Or are the data items intentionally left unlabeled?

Similarly, in the "Salad Dressings: All in proportion" graphic on page 118, why aren't the individual dressings labeled? On the previous page, with "The Poison" and "The Remedy", the drinks are labeled, so therefore I would expect the salad dressings on the following page to labeled as well (especially since the graphic design of these pages are so similar). However, this is not the case.

In general, it seems like there are more than a few labeling issues in the graphics through out the book, and I was left wondering if this omissions were erroneous or intentional? It wasn't always clear.

But missing labels isn't the only problem. The "Not Nice: Food colourings linked to unpleasant health effects" graphic on page 119 contains no mention of health effects in the actual graphic. Is that the point? That there is no unpleasant health effects linked to food colouring? I wasn't sure after looking at the graphic.

These are just a few examples of some of the problems with the visualization found in The Visual Miscellaneum, and unfortunately these errors complete spoil the entire book. I would agree with Christian Rudder's Amazon review that this book is an example of how not to present information, and if you're looking for visualization excellency, consider the work by Edward R. Tufte instead.

I just got and have been skimming through. Some of the visual charts are more interesting to read than others. Some charts are also easier to read/interpret than others. However, there are plenty to choose from.

Though says hardcover, the copy I have is actually a nice softcover. [Appears that Amazon has corrected this on the product page]

I have found a couple pages that it looks like the writing didn't print properly on. Most of the pages 60-65 (may be 66) are missing writing. I haven't noticed outside these pages.

Example of pg missing text:
pg 64, Excuses Us: Reasons for Divorce
The page in my book is a collection of colored circles. Only writing besides title and reference is that purple indicates the top excuse for women and pink is the top excuse for men.
If the text does appear in someone else's book, please comment. [I've heard from others that they are missing text on those pages from their copies also. Author has now put up a PDF with the missing pages. Password required (indicates it is a word from the book and where to find it).
[...]]

Overall, I am glad got the book. I'm looking forward to comments from friends and conversations that result from casual browsing.

I received this book yesterday and spent a wonderful evening pouring over each page- enjoying both the visual and mental aspects of this book! If learning was always this fun, there would be a lot more folks going after PhD's- looking for data sets that they could turn into gorgeous graphs/images. The book is funny, serious, sobering, and alarming by turns- but always stunning in it's presentation.

A wonderful coffee table book or Christmas gift.

This was a fun book to read through, I must admit. It's beautifully illustrated and is informative on a wide variety of topics. That being said, I felt compelled to write this review to offer some constructive criticism about some fairly glaring flaws.

* As other reviews state, a gross printing error resulted in a chunk of pages being misprinted to the point of being useless. It's very uncommon to see an error this bad in a finished book. While I was able to download a corrected PDF from the book's website, it's of little consolation as it's not part of the book itself.

* The book has some very innovative and beautiful presentations of information. However, at times it also feels like an amateurish experiment. I'm not sure how to put it other than to say that some of the illustrations just don't work at all. They're either confusing or make the data more difficult to interpret or understand than black-and-white text. The purpose of the project should be to enlighten, not obscure, understanding. Some diagrams make little to no sense. Other items are labeled so sparingly that they can be interpreted in multiple, contradicting ways.

* Sometimes I questioned the sourcing and quality of the information. Some of it can be a little difficult to believe. And unfortunately, a lot of it is tagged with the text, "source: Wikipedia." I love Wikipedia as much as the next person, but I expect a little more from a professional and relatively expensive book like this. Again, this level of research seems a little amateurish, especially when it's frequent.

* Lastly, I found lots of other miscellaneous errors in the book. They included typos, words superimposed on top of each other unintentionally, and missing words or pieces of sentences. I can only compare it to other books that look as nice as this, and the fact is that people aren't used to seeing this many errors in a book similar to this one.

Okay, I'm done being critical. Despite my comments, you can see that I still rate the book 4 of 5 stars. Why? Because the reality is that, for all its faults, I really enjoyed the book. I got out of it what I wanted when I first was attracted by its colorful cover and the sample illustrations from the book's website. All I have to say is this: Please be more careful in the (inevitable?) sequel.

Cheers!

As others have stated, there are gross inaccuracies in some of the visualizations. Overall the book feels a lot like a student project, and not a professionally produced design book. Many of the visualizations/illustrations have an amateurish feel, and the design of the book itself is poorly executed. Graphics and text run right up to the page edges & deep into the binding. I got this hoping it would be inspirational to have around, but unfortunately it primarily offers cautionary examples of what not to do.