V. Cheval
V. Cheval is a data analyst who writes books that refuse to stay in their lane.
His day job lives in spreadsheets, verification models, and large datasets. His weekends live in restaurant booths across the Southwest, writing reviews of places most guidebooks skip. His bookshelves hold Hunter S. Thompson and Thomas Piketty in equal measure, and if you ask him which one influenced his writing more, he will tell you it depends on the book.
He started where a lot of data people start: obsessed with baseball cards as a teenager, not for the players but for the numbers on the back. Batting averages, slugging percentages, on-base stats. He was coaching fantasy baseball before he could drive. That obsession with what the numbers actually say rather than what people assume they say never went away. It just found bigger datasets.
His first two books in this series, Analytical Thinking Skills For Young Adults and Digital Citizenship Skills For Young Adults, bring analytical rigor to a younger audience. His third book, The Vegas Dining Companion, is something else entirely: a dining guide to some of Las Vegas's most interesting restaurants that is also, for readers paying close attention, something much stranger and more philosophical than it first appears. One early reader called it an unexpected mind-trip. Cheval took that as the highest possible compliment.
His fourth and newest book, Meet the Billionaires, traces 125 years of how the world's largest fortunes actually get built. It profiles more than forty billionaires across four economic eras and asks the question most business books dance around: what did all of this cost, and who paid for it?
Cheval holds a Master's degree. He is a self-described gonzo journalist, a devoted follower of wherever the data leads, and a Discordian pope, which is either a joke or a philosophical commitment depending on when you ask him. He has the rare ability to make a spreadsheet feel dangerous and a dining review feel like a plot twist. He lives in Arizona, writes about everywhere, and will talk for hours about any dataset you put in front of him.
His motto is simple: follow the data.
V. Cheval's books in the series
- Analytical Thinking Skills For Young Adults
- Digital Citizenship Skills For Young Adults — in progress
- Systems Thinking Skills For Young Adults — co-author with RJ Barranco