Happy publication day to Science and Me! This inspirational book by Ali Winter and Mickael El Fathi explores the fascinating real-life stories of Nobel Prize winners.
Science and Me invites the reader to learn about the lives of brilliant men and women who have shaped our world through their scientific discoveries and often heroism, too. We start with the story of Alfred Nobel himself, and how his mixed feelings of pride and regret over his discover of gunpowder, led him to donate most of his fortune to what we know as the five annual Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Literature and Peace. This book focuses on winners of the science awards and there is a beautiful poem asking us to think about what science means to us.
My daughter loved the contents page that sets the tone of the book as an epic voyage of discovery. I really loved the next page, which was also like a contents page, but this time showing where in the world the Nobel prize winners were born. It makes you appreciate how the entire world has come together to make these huge advances in our understanding of science.
Each spread tells us about a different Nobel Prize winner, beginning with the incredibly moving story of the wonderful mother and daughter team, Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie. My daughter loved that the young child on the book cover features someone where on every spread of the book and my daughter. I love this playful touch in the illustrations, too. Here, she could be seen walking amongst the penguins.
The life-story that captivated my daughter the most, was Mario J. Molina. And it was down to Mickael El Fathi’s exquisite illustration of the penguins and the damage chloroflurocarbons caused to the ozone layer. Mario won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995 and was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2013.
Science and Me is a book that you can dip in-and-out of, and would be brilliant to use in schools to align with different subjects being studies, from science and history to climate change.
Published by Lantana Publishing, 1 April 2021
I am very grateful to the publisher for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book. This voluntary review contains my honest opinion.
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