Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Wurman identifies a special ailment of this age of communicationsso-called ``information anxiety,'' caused, in his view, by an overwhelming flood of data, much of it from computers and much of it unintelligible. The author, a graphic artist and architect, argues that ``learning is remembering what you are interested in,'' and proposes to help the anxious individual to select personally relevant information from the body of raw data or ``non-information.'' He also demonstrates how to ``access'' resources and take advantage of experiences, suggesting specific information-processing skills and media habits. His breezy, colloquial style using short, headlined paragraphs is sprinkled with graphics and notes, imaginative quotes and anecdotes. This stimulating book is worth reading in or out of sequence if only for Wurman's views on education and the need to ``transform information into structured knowledge.'' Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.