Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A Graphic Biography

This 100-page book was published to celebrate the bicentenary of Brunel's birth, and made available mainly to local schools, libraries etc in Bristol, to encourage children to learn about science, engineering, and local history. It's not for sale through bookshops and so the only other way to get hold of it is secondhand.

It's a cross between a 'proper' book and a graphic novel, the result being closer to a (heavily) illustrated novel than anything else. There's very little of the sequential graphic narrative that a proper comicbook would use - most of the story is told via the text.

Brunel scholars will learn little new, as pretty much all the material is drawn from other biographies, but that's hardly the target audience. To try and show more keep it interesting, there are several jokes, sarcastic comments etc, although to my taste it could have happily had far more of these as it still often reads as a dry history lesson.

The illustration is good and does help understand the text, although there are very few technical diagrams that might be suitable for a secondary school science subject, for example. This is a history of technology which is fairly light on the technology, although this is true also of the "grown-up" Brunel biographies.

I felt it missed some of the criticisms of Brunel's personality that Adrian Vaughan's biography did a good job of highlighting (in many ways, he wasn't a particularly pleasant person, especially in his business dealings).

But my main complaint is simply that the comicstrip concept wasn't used fully. I'd far prefer to have had less text and more rollicking pictorial narrative - especially since this would have helped the book to "show" rather than "tell" - as it is, there's far too much telling and too little showing. Having said all that, I'm sure it would make a great book for a youngster already showing signs of an interest in the engineering field. show less