Edward R. Tufte

How the mighty are falling... so many typos; did he ever proofread this? And too many pages (of this admittedly beautiful book) I found to be incomprehensible. And of those I did understand, many seemed to be simply conclusory material: too often he presents statements or quotations as if they are facts, or clever-but-true aphorisms (which are something else entirely), without providing any basis for them.

His first volume is amazing. The second is good, although the fourth is mostly a somewhat improved version of similar material. The third left no impression on me at all. And this fifth seems to be written to a much different, and far lower, standard. Much of the time, I simply had no idea of what new point he was trying to make (nor, therefore, how it might affect how I create or consume material intended to communicate facts).

I try to read Tufte's books with my brain firmly engaged; but even so this one just left me wondering what it was all about.… (more)

The fourth of Tufte's series of books on the visual display of information. It is the most eccentric of the series and includes a moderate amount of recycled material from the previous volumes. There is remarkable vitriol in an amount that I think you can only see in a self-published book, with an illustrated non-anonymized attack on one economics professor's book, and a prolonged attack on Microsoft Powerpoint that refers to Stalin more than once. There are also, of course, many interesting things, e.g. some discussion of Conway's Law. The book ends with a very odd criticism of some works of landscape architecture, and then photographs of some of the author's sculptures.… (more)