The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics is a new book by Grady Klein and Alan Dabney that is a top-notch introductory grounding in statistical concepts told through a series of witty, funny cartoons that relate stats to everything from fish populations to alien opinion surveys. This is a very introductory text, and it assumes that you know nothing about stats — not even why you’d want to know more about the subject. The book tackles both the task of providing a grounding in statistical concepts (mean/median, standard deviation, null hypothesis, random sampling, confidence intervals, etc) and explaining in clear and exciting ways why you’d care about any of this stuff.
The authors do a great job of conveying the source material in clear, stepwise fashion, and made the wise decision to put the equations at the back of the book in an appendix called “The Math Cave.” They don’t delve deeply into any intermediate subjects like assessing correlation (for this, I highly recommend 1993’s The Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith, about which I can’t say enough great and enthusiastic things), but that’s probably a wise tactical decision. Confining the material to basics makes the whole work into an unqualified success.