The subtitle of Visual Explanations is fair warning: the name of this game is synthesis. Traditionally, images have been the province of temperamental artists, quantities and evidence the pastures of hard-headed empiricists, and narrative the peat of crafty storytellers. For centuries, the good yeomen of academic disciplines have been enforcing these property rights. But Professor Tufte roams, grazes, and tills these territories ad libitum. His thesis maintains that representing information about space, time, cause, effect, and number (the hard currency of scientific and technical discourse) requires a privileged place: a warren where the "principles of design replicate the principles of thought" so that "the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight" (p. 9).

This book's high standards of form-content complementarity support this lofty goal without caricature. At the same time, this is a practical book; the reader can learn numerous graphical-design strategies for representing order-of-scale reasoning, process and change, kinematics and causality. These lessons are credible for three reasons: a) the author is an expert on aesthetic matters by virtue of having authored and published two highly regarded texts on so-called visual literacy; b) he teaches courses in statistical evidence at a venerable institution; c) he is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. This seemingly paradoxical combination of credentials signals the reader that the author's right and left brains have not been deployed in mutually encumbering contradiction. Further, given the pride of place which the language of statistics holds in the study of anomalous phenomena, generally, and the pages of the Journal now in your hands, specifically, the opportunity to absorb Tufte's amalgam of art and science could prove refreshing.

Visual Explanations is also valuable because its well-organized chapters are addressing an essential issue in human communication, i.e., how can we combine, compress, and transform the multidimensional parameters of objective information and the subtleties of subjective experience into two-dimensional media? On the basis of Tufte's superb treatment of this issue, I personally hope that his next book includes a discussion of the problems associated with depicting the geometry of higher dimensions. An explanation of how strange-yet-fascinating objects like the hypercube, Klein bottle, and tesseract represent visual explanations of "spaces" would provide an edifying and felicitous extension of his thesis.

If you prefer your logic cold and your abstractions mathematical, then this is probably not the book for you. But what if, as a child, you were enchanted by the sensuous spell of books - their imaginative possibilities, physical accessibility, colors, textures, and redolence? Then this beautifully crafted book can carry you back in time. It will be your Madeleine, one of those delicate baked goods which Marcel Proust described as a source of inspiration for Remembrance of Things Past.

Arnold L. Lettieri, Jr.
C-131, Engineering Quadrangle
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

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