Well-suited to middle and high schoolers as well as to adults seeking to brush up their statistical skills without breaking...
A gentle, pleasantly illustrated induction into the strange world of bell curves and chi squares.
If you’re numerate enough to comprehend statistics, then is a cartoon approach to the subject necessary? Sure. As graphic artist Klein (The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, 2012, etc.) and Dabney (Statistics/Texas A&M Univ.) note, statistics are everywhere—in sports, finance, government, the weather and just about every aspect of life—and knowing how to make use of them affords us the ability “to make confident statements.” Turning to standard deviations, sampling distributions, probabilities and all the other stuff of the statistician’s art, Klein and Dabney ably show how these “confident statements” are put to use, among others, by politicians, who extrapolate from the numbers to make policy decisions. There would seem, in that regard, to be a 90 percent likelihood that one of the politicians they lampoon is the balloonlike Newt Gingrich, who is no stranger to confident if errant statements of presumed fact. One central fact to which the authors return often is that “the more averages you pile up, the more normal-shaped the pile tends to become,” that normal shape being, yes, the bell curve, “the most beautiful shape in all of statistics.” Though the results are likely to yield that normal shape regardless, then, this is one reason careful statisticians prefer large and random samples. There is some inevitable simplification here—as they note, “in practice…conditions are often more complex”—but Klein and Dabney give a smart, enjoyable overview of this most useful branch of mathematics.
Well-suited to middle and high schoolers as well as to adults seeking to brush up their statistical skills without breaking a sweat.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8090-3359-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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SEEN & HEARD
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.
A tour of calculus from the polymath whose illustrated guides have illuminated a wide range of subjects, from genetics and sex to the environment and the universe.
This time out, unfortunately, Muse cartoonist Gonick’s (The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, 2009, etc.) presentation is labored, the cartoons are primarily decorative and the course is tough. To begin with, calculus requires four years of high-school math, which the author reprises in the first 50 pages. For many readers this will be a slog through algebra, trigonometry, exponentials, function theory, etc. While most texts map equations onto lines or curves on a standard x-y axis, Gonick introduces parallel lines with arrows connecting an x value on one line to its f(x) value on the parallel line. This approach is particularly unhelpful when you want to visualize, say, minute changes of position (on the y axis) over time (on the x axis). Nor does the author discuss fundamental concepts like continuity or maxima and minima until well into the chapters on the derivative and differential calculus. While he does highlight fundamental theorems and classic rules, Gonick devotes too much space to how-to manipulations like how to differentiate inverse functions. The narrative improves when the author introduces the concept of the integral as the sum of skinny rectangles under a curve, and Gonick provides many helpful, practical examples of how calculus is used.
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-168909-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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