How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

This is not just a good book, this is an important book

I’m a big fan of Cairo’s work and recommend his two previous books, "The Functional Art" and "The Truthful Art", to people who attend my workshops.

Those books are for people who need to create charts and information graphics.

With "How Chart Lie", Cairo is targeting a much larger audience.

Everyone.

Cairo is concerned at how politicians, advertisers, and the media use charts to bamboozle the public. He desperately wants to stop the spread of misinformation and wants you, the reader, to know BS when you see it. As he writes “we all have the civic duty to avoid spreading charts and stories that may be misleading. We must contribute to a healthier informational environment.”

Cairo is an entertaining and engaging writer and a superb graphic designer. He’s also a very good teacher and those with any degree of curiosity will learn a great deal from him.

Please be assured that the book is not just about how to avoid being duped by charts. There are many uplifting examples where Cairo channels his inner Hans Rosling and shows how much better life can be when we truly see and understand the data.

I’m sorry our education system doesn’t require that people take civics classes anymore, and that this isn’t the primary reading material for those classes. We’d have better citizens.

Cairo review - A perfectly timed book, and an accessible one

Alberto Cairo’s latest seems perfectly timed considering the current state of news, media and politics. The book targets itself more to the average consumer of charts rather than data viz professionals, and to that end it contains a lot of examples from politics starting off with variations on the 2016 presidential voting map. It’s a good example to kick off the discussion as it demonstrates in various ways how charts can deceive.

The rest of the book is broken down into different ways that charts can lie—either intentionally or not—leaving the reader with the ultimate takeaway to be skeptical of everything. The more successful examples are the ones—like the presidential voting maps—that show the same data presented in different ways.

While any data viz pro will recognize a lot of expected topics, there is still some very good in depth coverage of Y-axes, scales, shading, data defining, and omission of data. All covered with accessible and understandable examples—some we’ve seen before and many we haven’t.

As always with the author, the book is thoroughly researched and well-notated with an excellent bibliography.

If there is a criticism, it might be in the production values of the book. Unlike Cairo’s previous works printed in full, glossy color, this is a 2-color production that forces you to focus more on the words really than the charts. Add to this the smaller form factor, and some of the charts printed all in shades of red and black can be a little hard to read at times. Ultimately the mood feels more academic than previous books, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Definitely worth adding to the bookshelf!