Smoke and Mirrors: How to bend facts and figures to your advantage Review

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(More customer reviews)The opening paragraph of this 2007 book says, "This book is about turning numbers into effective graphics, to persuade, impress or confuse. It explains the graphic techniques available to make the best of a good, mediocre or non-existent case without, quite, lying outright." The sub-title of the book is more succinct: "How to bend facts and figures to your advantage."
Despite all that, the book is not a tome that has been surreptitiously smuggled out of the library of the School for Scoundrels. Author Nicholas Strange is an Englishman who makes his living creating graphic presentations for businesses and training others in the art. Like many enthusiasts, he tends to give too much weight to the importance of his subject. On the other hand, such is his love and fascination for the subject that it seeps right out of the printed pages to offer a surprisingly entertaining tour through the realms of the fuzzy thinking, the illogical and the downright crooked.
The book consists of 200 pages and about the same number of misleading, confused and/or prevaricating graphs, taken mainly but not entirely from British sources, some as (apparently) respectable as the BBC and the London Times.
The presentation is quite straightforward and methodical. After some introductory material, the author devotes one short unit after another to some specific type of distortion and presents a real world, and generally quite recent example of the thing in action.
The chapter headings of the book neatly summarize its contents and approach:
1. Introduction
2. The power of graphics
3. Distorting values - manipulating the data
4. Distorting values - graphical manipulation
5. Distorting categories and time - data manipulation
6. Distorting categories and time - graphical manipulation
7. Distorting the whole chart
The tone of the book is rather breezy, giving me the impression that the author is something of a wise guy in real life. This occasionally pays off in a nice turn of phrase: "The BBC found an answer in simply taking year on year monthly change rather than absolute prices.... The results look uncannily like the ballistic path of a market on its way to final impact in the Slough of Despond." [Page 50] Two hundred pages of that sort of thing, does get to be a little wearing, though.
The strength of the book is in the examples. Chapter 2 tells the chilling tales of how Morton-Thiokol with hand-drawn graphics for the Space Shuttle Challenger and then, seventeen years later, Boeing with PowerPoint slides for the Columbia, graphed their way toward calamity.
There are two minor weaknesses. Author Strange has a certain understandable bias toward quantifying the subjective effectiveness of his nefarious techniques. He has created two new measures, the Potential Deceit Quotient (PDQ), the ratio of the perceived value in the chart to original data value, and the Sore Thumb Discount (STD), the portion of the deceit quotient that gets noticed, or at least unconsciously discounted, by the viewer of the chart. This leads to the following equation which he uses to whomp up (dubious) numerical values for many of the subsequent treacherously lying graphics: PDQ x (1-STD) = net (i.e. discounted) expected value of the technique.
The other weakness is that in a couple of instances, Author Strange's explanation of why a chart is misleading neatly exposes the fact that he doesn't know what he is talking about. The most obvious of these appears on pages 43-44 where his explanation of why a simple little graphic showing the distribution of US veterans among the states is misleading veers straight off into Cloud-cuckoo-land. It took me a couple of re-readings to figure out that Strange was under the misapprehension that the word "veteran," as used in the US, meant a retired and elderly soldier (sailor or whatever) living primarily on a military pension. Well, as the Gershwins long ago pointed out, it ain't necessarily so.
The weaknesses of the book are minor and its strengths, to anyone with an interest in good old underhanded razzle-dazzle, are impressive. I think the book deserves five stars.

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Smoke and Mirrors takes a comprehensive and entertaining look at how charts, graphs and diagrams can be used to massage a message in business, research or government without fibbing outright. Using real examples from British and American newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and government ministries,it describes, explains and evaluates 57 different techniques ofpresenting information in a way that supports your angle. Eachtechnique is given a PDQ (potential deceit quotient) as well as an STD (sore thumb discount).Droll and informative, Smoke and Mirrors is a perfect companion for:? anyone who produces charts and graphs at work ? anyone who has them thrust upon them ? anyone wanting to read between the lines The company report may never look the same again? 'a provocative read for managers and spin-doctors alike?entertaining.' Management Today