Indeed, although Gonick presents the details via cartoons, that does not change the fact that "Sigma" is still "Sigma", and if you don't understand exactly what "Sigma" represents before moving on to the next concept, then you will not understand the subsequent lessons.

ie. Just because cartoons tell the tale, it doesn't mean that you will breeze through this book as you might a comic book. The individual concepts must be read and reread and perhaps even contemplated in order to truly understand each one before moving on to the next concept. If you do not do this, then, of course, nothing will make sense.

This is a book of statistics, not miracles...thus work will still be necessary in order to absorb the basic concepts within it.

Nevertheless, this book is far clearer and much more fun to read than any other stat book I've opened before. Very highly recommended.

111 of 112 found the following review helpful:


GREAT BOOK (covers probability theory painlessly & well)  Apr 28, 1999
Probability theory (uncertainty, error estimates, confidence intervals, "p-values" and the like) take time to understand, and rigorous approaches fail to get the concepts across to the non-mathemetician.

Gonick & Woolcott's Cartoon Guide to Statistics gets the ideas across with a minimum of math, and a maximum of "common sense" & (dare I say it?) intuition. The reader get's a FEEL for Probability and Statistics without violating the rigorous underpinnings of statistical theory.

I've taught Statistics to undergrad and grad students, and have had to teach into stats to Grad Students in 7 week Summer short courses, and I required everybody to buy exactly the same statistics calculator (one of the TI models with a couple chapters devoted to the mechanics of "doing statistics"), Cliff Notes _Statistics_, Darryl Huff's _How_to_Lie_With_Statistics_ (a classic cartoon guide I read decades ago) and Gonick's _Cartoon_Guide_to_Statistics_.

The 4 paperbacks (including the book that comes with the TI calculator) complement each other very well.

If you want to learn Statistics, without the standard Sadistics, I recommend Cliff, Huff, T.I. & Gonick. Enjoy!

44 of 44 found the following review helpful:


Excellent suppliment to dry statistics books  Feb 14, 2002 By Eric C
This book was included in the materials for a business statistics class at Anderson. Bogged down by the reading from the course book and study guide, I didn't even open the cartoon guide for weeks, thinking it was probably too dumbed down to be helpful. Was I ever wrong. Concepts that were very difficult to understand in the course book were elucidated by the excellent examples and explanations in this guide. Made reviewing general concepts for the final exam much easier as well.

This book won't help you much in the practical application of statistics (for that you need problem sets), but will certainly aid in understanding the general ideas behind the math.

25 of 25 found the following review helpful:


A better way to grasp the applications of statistics  Jul 03, 2002 By C M
I disagree with the reviewer who thought the book was not useful for those without a grasp of basic statistics. Gonick presents the material in a comical, yet cogent manner designed specifically for those who might otherwise never grasp WHY and HOW they might use statistics.

The truth is most college level statistics courses start with the development of a theory and only move to practical applications if there is time. Gonick presents a series of real-world problems and works backwards to the theory; a method I have seen work well in the business world. The book is not meant to be an exhaustive resource for graduate level statistics and analysis, but rather a better way for educated users to grasp the application of statistics to understandable problems.

We used this book to help acclimate freshly minted graduates to statistical analysis in banking, financial services and marketing. Every person to whom we gave a copy was very pleased with the book.

50 of 55 found the following review helpful:


A Good Introduction  May 02, 2004 By Dave_42 "Dave_42"
This book is a good introductory level look at Statistics. The authors cover what the subject of Statistics is, the history of Statistics, some of the theories and terms, and also shows some applications of the subject.

The weakness of the book is that there are a lot of formulas given and not enough discussion of how those formulas are derived, so one would need to use other statistics texts to supplement the material. Thus this book cannot stand alone. On the other hand, if one is just trying to get an overview of the subject, then there is a lot to skip over. The authors do make a humorous presentation of the material, so those that are looking for an overview may find this a more enjoyable introduction to the subject.

There is also a lot to do with Statistics that the book does not mention. It does cover probabilities, but when it comes to distributions it focuses only on Standard Normal distributions. I don't believe it ever mentions Uniform, Poisson, or other types of distributions which most Statistics courses cover.

The best part of the book is the examples, some of which are carried through for several chapters to help the reader better understand the subject. Although, even with the examples they are a bit inconsistent in their presentation. For example, in one case they started to discuss the use of statistics to compare the salaries of male and female employees in the same job, but they never complete the discussion. The examples of racial bias in jury selection, and the gas mileage comparison of two different types of gas are much more complete.

This is a decent book, but not up to the level of Gonick's excellent "Cartoon History of the Universe" series, and not strong enough to give it more than three stars.

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