Button Books £9.99
ISBN: 978-1-78708-164-2
If you wanted to sum up the words ‘National Treasure’ in two words then you couldn’t really get past the subject of this book. The great lives in graphics are not biographies in the proper sense of the word, but they do through charts, drawings and comparisons dip the toe in the big pond of the person being celebrated.
In the case of David Attenborough it is a big and deep and incredibly rewarding pond and this latest in the series (others subjects include Mandela, Einstein, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank, Da Vinci and Shakespeare to name a few) we get to see what an impact he has had on broadcasting and understanding of the natural world. Most of us would class him as one of the greatest documenters of the natural world but few would know that before wowing us in front of the camera he was a bigwig at the BBC and commissioned such diverse classics as Monty Python and Match of the Day and two programmes that had an immense effect on me as a young adult: Civilisation and The Ascent of Man.
In the pages here you will discover new and extinct species named after him – there are dozens, of his actor brother, Richard (who I once interviewed) and of a phobia that he has.
Aimed at the age 8-12 age range I still found this rewarding and gave me plenty of facts that I didn’t know of all crammed into 32 rewarding pages.