Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I've enjoyed very many of these young children's biographies about a host of different people. This one is about computer scientist Alan Turing, who was responsible for breaking the secret of a major German coding machine in World War Two and who was subsequently persecuted for his homosexuality.
Way to thank a war hero, UK! He was, at long last, pardoned, but he should never have been arrested for it in the first place, and the pardon came long years after his suicide. If he'd been hailed as the hero he was and funded, he could have put Britain at the forefront of computing.
This book doesn't pull any punches and tells his story simply and in enough detail for young minds without overdoing it. It's nicely-illustrated by Hunter and is well worth the reading. I commend it. There is one small glitch which hopefully will have been fixed before this goes on sale. At the back of each of these books is a timeline with actual photographs of the subject at different points in their life. This book is no different, but the person featured in the photographs isn't Alan Turing; it's Astrid Lindgren, author of the Pippi Longstocking books! While Turing might well have been amused by this, it really needs to be fixed.
