How to Lie With Maps, Mark Monmonier
Oddly, this is mostly written as instructions on how to lie with maps, with
only occasional sections on how to tell if a map is being used to lie to
you. Anyone reasonably alert can convert one tack to the other, but it's a
funny thing to read.
The comparison of cartographic projections is interesting but not novel:
because familiar, it's probably a good introduction with his point that all
maps lie, in that they all have to suppress something. (If they didn't,
they'd be exact copies of the territory.) The chapter "Data Maps: Making
Nonsense of the Census" was more useful because the number-shuffling it
takes on is so much the high-priest incantation of our days. "Data Maps"
picks a simple example (data on televisions per household in twenty-eight
adjacent areas) and shows the same data in a dozen subtly different ways. He
doesn't try to teach enough statistics to explain what the different samples
are showing about the data.
So wrote clew in
Technology.