The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia
ISBN:9780061748363 read summary

This book has been on our coffee table for the last 5 months. It's such a great conversation starter. Guests at our home have found the book very interesting. The one thing I don't like is that part of the diagrams are cut off due to the binding. =( That's why I gave it a 4.

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!

"Visual Miscellaneum" is a beautiful and informative book. It really is difficult to put down. I'm a hopeless book addict and spend hours reading virtually every day. After all those black letters on white pages, day after day after day, "Visual Miscellaneum" was an exotic pleasure that snuck up on me and stole my heart.

I highly recommend this book. It's a fun way to take in a lot of important information.

Some of my favorite entries include:

"The creationism-evolutionism spectrum,"

"Time Lines: Time travel plots in TV and film,"

"Dangers of Death,"

"What is consciousness."

In short, this is a cool and creative book you should definitely have sitting on your cofee table. It could save your life the next time boring people invade your home. Just reach for it and drift away as you flip through the pages.

--Guy P. Harrison, author of "Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know About Our Biological Diversity" and "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God" (a skeptical analysis of common justifications for religious belief)

Page 128 of this book is devoted to the different types of graphics used in diagrams, forty are named with a little graphic of each (pie chart, bar chart; word cloud etc and one called 'Dunno what to call it' chart) and I thought it would have been useful to run this page at the front of the book so that readers could try and identify what type of graphic was used on each page.

The editorial is an interesting one and gets away from the Tufte format of reproducing existing material by creating all the graphics for this book and maybe this is one of its weaknesses. I found so many of these graphic pages just too unwieldy and confusing, sort of the opposite of what this type of material is supposed to do: visually present information with clarity and simplicity. Plenty of pages have data that has been crowbarred into something visual that really should have remained just as a list. Pages 132/133 is about Postmodernism, maybe the designers just gave up with this because the spread is just text as in any book.

Shame about the missing text that everyone has mentioned. More importantly to me (and a real editorial weakness) is the large amount of unreadable type, either white out of a black page, light colored panels or just too tiny. Heavy use of Batteries Not Included Bold Condensed and Prices Subject To Change Without Notice Roman do not encourage clarity. It means I just turn over the page to the next diagram.

There are some fascinating visual ideas here but because they were not created for anything other than this book they lack the creative rigor that would normally be required if they were to be used in print elsewhere.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

As a data visualization newbie I really liked this book. It is a great collection of information visualizations which are both elegant and interesting. It is more inspiring than teaching. And yes, it is also a little addictive: I found myself watching the same graphics over and over again.

The main complaint is to the publisher: some pages are missing labels. If you have this book, you definitely want to get the errata (see the author's page).