Book-Review

Written by Larry Gonick & Woollcott Smith Note: This is based on the “Revised and Updated Edition”. Cover page of The Cartoon Guide to Statistics Deriving, and learning when to apply, statistical formulas is always going to be difficult. It turns out that including cartoons does not make it any easier. I would put statistics writing into three general categories: teaching statistical literacy, e.g., How To Lie With Statistics; deriving the principles of statistical concepts, e.g., any college-level textbook; and applying statistical methods, e.g., an academic study. The Cartoon Guide To Statistics tries to do a bit of all three of these, and is worse off for it. The guide covers probability, random variables, sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, experimental design, and regression in just over 200 pages. ...

Written by Darrell Huff and illustrated by Irving Geis. Originally published in 1954. In a sentence: a quick, worthwhile general knowledge read that explains how people misuse statistics through familiar and useful examples (that could use an update). I’ll face up to the serious purpose that I like to think lurks just beneath the surface of this book: explaining how to look a phony statistic in the eye and face it down; and no less important, how to recognize sound and usable data in that wilderness of fraud… ...