Great Lives in Graphics:Mandela
Great Lives in Graphics: Coco Chanel
Great Lives in Graphics: Marie Curie
Button Books

When in my early years of teaching, I passed on the news to my KS2 class that Nelson Mandela had finally been freed from prison, we all climbed up on the tables and cheered. (You’d never get away with that now but Mandela was then and has remained, my all time hero.) So of course, I was immediately interested to see the first of these titles being added to this very useful series. Readers will discover how Nelson’s life as the son of an African chief resulted, through his education, in his becoming an activist who protested against the apartheid system imposed by the white minority in South Africa in 1948; how his activism eventually led, when he was leader of the military wing of the ANC, to his arrest in 1962. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.

Fortunately though, he was released age 71, in 1990, a year before apartheid was abolished. After his release, Nelson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1993) and the following year became South Africa’s first democratically elected president. he spent his last years in his home village.
An awesome man indeed.

If vou have an interest in fashion, then try a companion volume about Coco Chanel who overcame poverty as a child to become one of Paris’s key artistic talents. However, during WW2 it was rumoured that Coco acted as a Nazi spy. She made a comeback in fashion, in 1954, aged over seventy when she transcended ageism with her designs.

We all owe a great deal to Marie Curie, subject of the third book, the only woman to have been awarded two Nobel prizes, the first for physics, the second eight years later in 1911, for chemistry. Justifiably being dubbed a scientific genius, Marie faced prejudice and sickness, dying suddenly in 1934 from a bone marrow disease resulting from the effects of radiation.

All three, highly visual biographies, each of which has a final glossary, are definitely worth adding to KS2 libraries.