Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I work in finance and create many charts and graphs. I figured a book like this would help me to design them better. I was really looking for a practical guide rather than a long, rambling academic textbook, but that's how this book reads. It seems aimed at college underclassmen rather than business professionals. Few spends page after page discussing the most basic mathematical concepts and things that you simply don't need to know in order to create a graph. For example, there is an entire chapter on basic statistics such as how to calculate a mean, median and mode. There is also a lengthy discussion of how the human eye works. As I went through the book I found myself thinking: "Wow, Few has so little to say about tables and graphs that he needs all of this filler material to make this seem like a real book!" There are some valuable chapters at the end of the book, but it takes a lot of patience to get there. The page format is also really annoying and too textbook-like. It is a really wide book with citations (90% of which seemed to be from Tufte) in the wide margins. I give this review one star for the 15 or so pages worth of good advice it contains. Unfortunately that wasn't enough content to warrant an entire textbook If you're a business professional looking for something you can use, this book is VASTLY overpriced and oversized. My final comment is on the cover: An eye. A Brain. A sun. Bars coming out of each. It says very little to me, and that seemed to be the theme of the book. I wish I'd have seen a real review on this book before I shelled out $30.