How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff gives an explanation of common statistical errors. The book is clearly written and is understandable to a reader without a mathematics or statistics background. At only one hundred and forty two pages the book is a quick and easy read.

The book was originally published in 1954. The many copious examples were current at the time of writing, but are extremely dated now. Depending on the readers attitude this may be distracting, or faintly amusing. The advanced age of the examples does not make the text any harder to understand.

While the examples are dated, the concepts appear to be timeless. The same statistical manipulations still seem to be going on nearly fifty years later. The Author covers a wide range of statistical errors, or abuse. All of the types of errors will be familiar to anyone who pays attention to the news, or has seen an advertisement that uses numbers.

How to Lie with Statistics gives the reader the knowledge to detect common statistical skulduggery. If this knowledge were more widely spread, perhaps advertisers, political spinmiesters and sloppy journalists would not be able to get away with that sort of abuse.

Since our schools regularly let us through without a single course in statistics, this book is for the general reader who is in peril of learning facts that aren't facts. It won't teach you statistics, but it will teach you what to look out for when you read the paper and see numbers and graphs. Since most institutions who report these data care little whether they are accurate or significant, you must rely on yourself to determine whether they are good numbers.

The problems with statistical data are still relevant today, and it is shocking to realize how contemporary many of his examples seem. The problems of bias, averaging, and confusing correlation with causation all dupe even the most well-educated people, and the advantage lies with the person who can spot fallacies and not be fooled. While learning statistics would be ideal, this book shows the first step towards understanding and critiquing statistical data. It is not longer or more complicated than it should be, and is simple to understand. Still, if you don't know how to evaluate some of the simple data that you come by every day in the news, this book will provide you with infinite wisdom.

My introduction to this book was by way of the 'required reading' list for my undergraduate statistics course. Bad first impression. But the book turned out to be fun to read, and enormously instructive. The class material for my college statistics course taught me HOW to do statistics, but this book gave me a good beginning understanding into the common methods of the abuse of statistics. Conversely, by implication, it also teaches how to present information in as truthful a manner as possible. The knowledge served me well as I further studied statistics at a graduate level, and continues to serve me as a Government Technical person, constantly working with statistical tools.

The book gives a good jump start into the interpretation of data presentations. Now, when I see a "Gee-Whiz Graph" I immediately know that the fluctuations shown in the line or bars are magnified, and I begin at once to look for the real difference (base 0) in the data points.

This book is living proof that learning can be fun. I highly recommend it to anyone working with or beseiged by data presented as graphs, averages, trends or any other such means. It will open your eyes.

The author tries to be a wit ... rather he is really painful. Other times he goes off into blissful lotus lands and at almost every opportunity appears to be attempting to write confusing word problems for an advanced algebra class of left over from an earlier time wild eyed hippies ... I mean if you are in a commune which has dedicated itself to solar heat and raising organic apples .. here is your book ... but for me more formulae and less of the cutesy stuff. Not hopeless just not 'real' useful.

because I teach math and I thought "Oh, there won't be anything in this book that I don't already know." WRONG! THis book is a browser's delight. As well as giving relatively clear directions on how to calculate a whole bunch of practical things, it gives away such secrets as how to do those annoying work word problems using only arithmetic, an easy way to do those annoying mixture word problems, how to weigh things using only nickels, the amazing relationship between nickels and the metric system,etc. Highly recommended.

This is not a math book, rather its an answer book that describes how to solve those "everyday" questions we tend to have. The usefullness of this book (especially about it's plain english way of describing money issues) is truly astounding.

This book discusses in easy to read "plain english" how to solve mortage and loan problems, as well as a large collection of general interest problems for the "typical" homeowner.

This is a fantastic book with at least a hundred different problems solved (everything from the true worth of college, to answering annuity questions). I recommend this for anyone who wants to know "How to figure it".