INFORMATION ANXIETY

by Richard Saul Wurman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 1988

Architect, guru, and designer of telephone books, consultant Wurman here presents us with a generally unrecognized malady and at the same time seriously exacerbates it. His text is an exasperating and prolix guerrilla attack on orderly and convincing presentation. (Compared, for example, to Arno Penzias' Ideas and Information, reviewed above, a lucid offering on a related topic.) Wurman has produced colorful and popular guide books to London, Paris, Tokyo, and Philadelphia as well as the California Yellow Pages. Now, using his own words, he essays a handbook on how to cope with burgeoning sources of information. His advice seems to be to ignore most of it, and nobody can argue with that. Yet a reader of this effort is very likely to come away with anxiety about his or her powers of comprehension--until the hooey becomes manifest. ""Books are a major source of information anxiety,"" Wurman begins. So he presents a 20-page table of contents which is to act as a full outline so that the book itself need not be read at all. The text is larded with marginal material, which is less Talmudic than distracting. Finally, the author informs us that, ""unlike many other books,"" his work ""doesn't have to be read sequentially. You can open to any chapter and read forward or backward."" It's fine when he tells us that we can visualize an acre as about the size of a football field without the end zones, but it's nonsense when we are told that we ""cannot perceive anything without a map."" (To help, he then defines a map to include a loan application or a production chart.) ""Originality is in the origins,"" he intones. The canard about Einstein lacking an aptitude for math is repeated. ""There is a misnomer that you can take a book and make it into an exhibit"" typifies his bruising use of the language. Desultory interviews, flashy graphics, and the marginalia can't mask the lack of substance. ""We are what we read,"" pontificates Wurman. Fair warning. A triumph of format over substance, there's less to this effort than meets the eye.

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION