Summary:

This chapter book biography about Nelson Mandela is a part of a biography series called Great Lives. These chapter books offer information and an in-depth look into the lives of historical leaders and heroes. This particular biography about Nelson Mandela talks about him as a hero for democracy in South Africa. The book begins with an introduction of Nelson Mandela serving his prison sentence at Pretoria Central Prison. Then in chapter two, the book goes back to the day that Nelson Mandela was born and continues to proceed in telling the events of his life in chronological order. This chapter book captures the moving story of Mandela’s life, as well as an in-depth look into South African life and its transformation over many years. Nelson Mandela had an enormous impact over South Africa and the book shares all of his struggles, defeats and accomplishments as well as lots of historical facts and information about the time period and life of the citizens.

Comments (opinions/arguments):

This book is a great chapter book for older elementary school students who may be doing a research project on Nelson Mandela or for some who just want to learn more about his life and South African history. Because this series of books is quite old, the book doesn’t offer too many pictures and is comprised mostly of text. I do like however, that the few pictures that it does offer are real photographs. I think this makes the events in the book really come to life for students because they get to see real evidence. I also like that the book has a table of contents in case a student is just looking to find out certain information about Mandela instead of having to read the entire book. The different chapters are broken up nicely to include information about his family, life as a politician, his trials, being a prisoner, his challenges and his presidency. This book also offers a ton of great information, details and dates on every event in history related to Nelson Mandela’s life and everything seems to be in chronological order. I like this because it’s much easier for children to follow the events in a story if everything is in the correct sequence from beginning to end. I also like that the book offers extra textual features such as pronunciation key for difficult words, a bibliography for more info, and a small section about the author. ( )