Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic learning tool. Makes light reading of statistics.
Review: Impressive effort at teaching basic statistics in a humorous
and comfortable environment. A pleasure to read. Surprizingly
full of hands-on examples and slightly distorted history.
If you define education as what is left after the book is back
on the shelf, this text is worth 4 semesters of math.
Rating:
Summary: This is for anyone who wants or needs to know about stats.
Review: Larry Gonick is a wiz at making difficult subjects interesting and easy to understand. I only wish I had this book when I took statistics in college. The illustrations alone make the book worthy to buy. Once you read one of his books, you just have to read the others.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK (covers probability theory painlessly & well)
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK (covers probability theory painlessly & well)
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Fun, well-written, and accessible overview of statistics
Review: Sometimes using the cartoon style is a way to cover up a lack of clear understanding with humor, but in this case the authors have succeeded in covering the topics for a non-technical person to grasp key ideas in statistics without burdening them with the theory. Great introductory text, but not deep enough for the mathematically inclined to get under the hood. But then again, there are plenty of other books for that purpose.
Rating:
Summary: A great icebreaker to an often cold subject
Review: Statistics is a very difficult subject both to learn and teach. I wish I'd discovered this book after I'd been through the first formal class--except it wasn't written then. :) Well anyway, the CGtS is a useful book and I've recommended it to many people, all of whom got a fair amount of mileage from it. You certainly need further references, but the examples are lucid and the silly cartoons help keep people from getting too overwhelmed by seriousness. I also like the fact that the authors go through some of the history of statistics, as the subject is much more comprehensible if you know why people did what they did. Someone mentioned getting SPSS--this is, IMO, a terrible way to learn the topic. Packages should come AFTER understanding, not the other way around. If you want a computer program to help out, use a spreadsheet.
Rating:
Summary: Clear, fun presentation of statistics
Review: Statistics is one of the things that everyone should know about, but no-one wants to learn. This book is a college-level, amazingly clear introduction to statistics. Another winner from the Gonick pen!
Rating:
Summary: applicatio
Review: the ability to apply stats to real world issues/problems/investigations/research is great
Rating: 
Summary: Okay but...
Review: The book is funny and quite helpful - nice material for review purposes. BUT, its merely a supplement to formal statistics study. You must have some working knowledge of the basic concepts. I recommend BUSINESS STATISTICS (By Ken Black). He explains the concepts quite extensively. This book coupled with the humor of the Cartoon Guide will make Statistics a little but more bearable (especially for non-math majors like me:)
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Introduction
Review: 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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