The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was a seriously good book. This, however, feels like a series of out-takes. Tufte is good enough that he can almost carry it off, and there's some good stuff, and it's still wonderfully presented, but... it lacks the spark of TVDoQI. It's not coherent, with some rather underwhelming chapters. The idea of sparklines is interesting, but... he seems to skip the question of how useful this high-density information really is in practice. The book finishes off with a reproduction of his anti-PowerPoint rant, and then some thoughts on the pedestal design, culminating in some photos of his sculptures. Er, right.
The first few chapters are worth a read, but fundamentally it's pretty disappointing.
Posted 2012-03-27.