Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography - Hardcover

Nelson Mandela was a former President of South Africa, the first to be elected in fully representative democratic elections. He was born in Transkei, South Africa, in 1918. Before his presidency, Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. In 1964, he was convicted of crimes including sabotage committed in the struggle against apartheid. He was imprisoned for 27 years at Robben Island prison and Pollsmoor prison. During his incarceration, his reputation as a potent symbol of resistance to apartheid grew steadily. Released from prison in 1990, Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and was inaugurated as President of South Africa in 1994. He is the author of the internationally bestselling autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom" and "Conversations with Myself", a collection of his personal papers. Mandela died in December 2013.

Adapted from the best-selling memoir, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), this handsomely designed, large-size volume with 200 photographs is sure to become most readers' first choice for reading about Mandela. The text has been cut, but not that much; there's still an extraordinary amount of detail about his personal life and the history and politics of the antiapartheid struggle, about his years underground, his 27 years in prison, and his triumphant election as president of South Africa's first democracy. In the original autobiography, there were some good photos, but they were small and clumped together. This book, with thick paper and lots of white space, has a high-quality photo on almost every page. The pictures don't just illustrate the historical account, they extend it. South Africa's great photographers, including Peter Magubane, Jurgen Schadeburg, and many more, document the events in their country. They capture the daily and the cataclysmic: what it has been like for those who live there, blacks and whites, separate and unequal for so long. The famous images are here (children carrying the body of Hector Peterson after the 1976 Soweto uprising; Mandela with his arm raised in triumph on his release from prison), but some pictures are new, published here for the first time. With its compelling cover portrait, full captions, and many sidebar quotes, this book will grab browsers, who will then find it hard to stop reading the amazing story. Hazel Rochman