I was greatly looking forward to Edward Tufte's fourth book Beautiful Evidence but after reading it I was a bit disappointed. I found it very repetitive of his previous books including the examples.
The first chapter was 30 pages long and covered Mapped Images, "representational images with scales, diagrams, overlays, numbers, words, images." It was lots of examples, so much so I was worried that it was just examples and would leave us to parse out the lessons, but he pulled through in the end and even summarize four lessons at the end of the chapter.
The second chapter was on Sparklines. These are small, graphs that fit into sentences as if they are words. They are good at showing showing trends in a small space and highlighting a few points. Examples are sports records, stock performance, and medical info. He ended the chapter with info on how to scale, color and format them in much more detail than he usually does which was nice. It's a cool concept and it's easy to see it's evolution from Galileo's description of seeing Saturn the first time and Tufte's previous medical charts. These have been discussed on Tufte's website for several years and there are some fonts to help you create these in current software apps. As a result it felt a little stale to me and they probably aren't something I'll use in the near future. If they're new for you, you should enjoy this chapter.
Chapter three was on diagrams with arrows. There were two diagrams showing the relationships between various artists and art movements. They were very good as was their description. However, other examples weren't so good. I didn't get the point of the horse drawing at all. Galileo's drawing while quite involved had no information about what it was and no translation, even the title. For someone who's usually so involved in explaining the actual data presented in the example, I had none of that here, all I could do was appreciate the pretty picture. While Feynman diagrams are incredibly useful to physicists, there's no way reading this book you could understand them. Then again there's no way to include enough description to explain them, so maybe they weren't a good example.
Tufte worships Galileo, in Chapter four he reproduces the same two pages from a Galileo book, not once or twice, but three times. In just four continuous pages! Fine, but on page 100 he goes too far when he starts commenting on how Galileo's printed stars show through to the opposite side of page. He says "The raking light and consequent shadows are similar to, say, the paly of sunlight on lunar mountains." Oh please. But I was happy to see his idolatry didn't stop him from offering improvements on Galileo's designs. He then went on to Issac Newton. I didn't think this added much and the 1.5 pages detailing "the dreary history of text/image segregation for the 23 editions in 5 languages of Newton's Opticks published since 1704" was exhaustive and unnecessary to make the point that images and descriptions should be closely located. He quickly moved to recent times and a 1 page graphic on "Spotting a hidden handgun" was gorgeous almost made me forget the rest.
Chapter five covers the six Fundamental principals of analytic design. The information presented is very good. As an example he uses the classic chart of Napolean's march on russia by Charles Joseph Minard. Anyone who knows Tufte knows this chart which in his first book he described as "It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn." It's reprinted five times in this chapter in it's entirety and various parts of it are also reprinted several more times over 13 pages. I agree with part of this, it means the reader doesn't have to turn back to previous pages to follow the narrative, but I've seen this so many times before I knew it by heart. It would have been better with a different example. I also thought that if the fold out version had another page and was printed on the back, I could refer to it while reading the following pages.
In spite of the name Beautiful Evidence, Tufte spends 45 pages showing ugly evidence. That's almost a quarter of the book's 200 pages. Chapter six is 16 pages of good examples of the ways people lie in presenting evidence. He coins a new word for this: economisting. Chapter seven is a 30 page compelling rant against PowerPoint. It's an expanded form of a pamphlet he previous released (which I own). The mock PowerPoint presentation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is hysterical. All of the examples were far worse than presentations I've seen and I believe I've seen many presentations that were helped by PowerPoint. Tufte says these are maybe 10% of all presentations, which struck me as an example of economisting. Trying to convincing the world to stop using PowerPoint is bold, perhaps impossibly so, but I've previously read this in his pamphlet and heard it at a lecture of his 10 years ago.
Chapter Eight I found rather inexplicable. It's 24 pages of sculptures and how they are displayed, particularly how large abstract landscape sculptures are mounted. Ok, most of them are sculptures by Tufte, but I found it rather self-indulgent.
The book certainly has some very good parts, but as it's his fourth book and drew on materials published on his site, I was disappointed by it.
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