Books like this about the dangers of statistical graphics for the lay readership are common enough that they have become a genre. This one is better written than most, but its a little verbose for the amount of information contained. The book itself is unusually well produced by Norton. ( )

As always, with Alberto Cairo, you get an entertaining, insightful, clearly-written book on the basics of data visualization, and the pitfalls that readers can encounter with charts. The stated goal is to develop the reader's graphical literary or graphicacy (a close cousin to numerical literacy and information literacy). In that goal, I would argue that book is very successful. It can be put in the hands of anyone as it is very accessible, with a lot of both serious and fun examples. In the era of fake news and distortions, it is a welcome antidote.
Which gets to my one source of irritation: Cairo's repeated assertion of his political moderation, sometimes couples with both-sides-do-it-ism. At this point in time, it is rather clear that one side has abandoned reason, logic, and basic truth-telling. This is not a case of both sides do it. And yes, we all tend to prefer charts that tell us reality is how we see it and supports our interpretation. But again, this framework does not apply to our current times of one side lying to a far worse extent, and isolating itself from anything outside Fox News.
As I said, this was my one source of irritation.
On a slightly different note: Cairo had a different publisher than for the Functional Art and The Truthful Art, and both books had better production, I thought, with softer paper and full color charts. That is not the case here. The color palette is much more limited, which is a shame when you want to show a significant number of charts.
That being said, again, a really great introductory book to the art and science of data visualization. ( )

This is a great overview of issues with creating and when reading charts and graphs. One of the things I really appreciated was that suboptimal, misleading, and not-recommended charts are clearly labeled as such. (For many books on charting I've found one has to carefully inspect the text to verify whether a given example is recommended or not.) I also like Cairo's repeated discussion of the role of ethics, both in authoring and in receiving a graphic. ( )

In this book, Cairo explains how good charts are constructed and how bad ones lie, whether through distorting the data, presenting too much or too little, or just being badly designed in the first place. Knowing how to interpret charts, and particularly to visit and question the sources of the data powering the chart, is crucial to being well informed in our visual-heavy society.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. The author draws on a variety of sources and explains well how to read various types of charts, as well as what exactly is wrong with the poorly designed charts. He also recommends other books that will broaden the reader’s understanding of statistics. This is worth picking up. ( )