Product Description

Hugely charismatic, humble, and possessed of preternatural luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her extraordinary life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya.

Born in a rural village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her studying with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD in East and Central Africa and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government. She makes clear the political and personal reasons that compelled her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages. We see how Maathai’s extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya’s government into the democracy in which she now serves as assistant minister for the environment and as a member of Parliament. And we are with her as she accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her “contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace.”

In Unbowed, Wangari Maathai offers an inspiriting message of hope and prosperity through self-sufficiency.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #510081 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-03
• Released on: 2006-10-03
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 9.73" h x 1.27" w x 6.48" l, 1.50 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Maathai, a 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presents a matter-of-fact account of her rather exceptional life in Kenya. Born in 1940, Matthai attended primary school at a time when Kenyan girls were not educated; went on to earn a Ph.D. and became head of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi before founding Kenya's Green Belt Movement in 1977, which mobilized thousands of women to plant trees in an effort to restore the country's indigenous forests. Because Kenya's environmental degradation was largely due to the policies of a corrupt government, she then made the Green Belt Movement part of a broader campaign for democracy. Maathai endured personal attacks by the ruling powers-President Moi denounced her as a "wayward" woman-and engaged in political activities that landed her in jail several times. When a new government came into power in 2002, she was elected to Parliament and appointed assistant minister in the Ministry for Environment and Natural Resources. Despite workmanlike prose, this memoir (after The Green Belt Movement) documents the remarkable achievements of an influential environmentalist and activist. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The mother of three, the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai of Kenya understands how the good earth sustains life both as a biologist and as a Kikuyu woman who, like generations before her, grew nourishing food in the rich soil of Kenya's central highlands. In her engrossing and eye-opening memoir, a work of tremendous dignity and rigor, Maathai describes the paradise she knew as a child in the 1940s, when Kenya was a "lush, green, fertile" land of plenty, and the deforested nightmare it became. Discriminated against as a female university professor, Maathai has fought hard for women's rights. And it was women she turned to when she undertook her mission to restore Kenya's decimated forests, launching the Green Belt Movement and providing women with work planting trees. Maathai's ingenious, courageous, and tenacious activism led to arrests, beatings, and death threats, and yet she and her tree-planting followers remained unbowed. Currently Kenya's deputy minister for the environment and natural resources, Nobel laureate, visionary, and hero, Maathai has restored humankind's innate if nearly lost knowledge of the intrinsic connection between thriving, wisely managed ecosystems and health, justice, and peace. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Concrete and mesmerizing, Unbowed is the story of resistance, a refusal to be bowed down by oppression and humiliation in the pursuit of the excellent and the heroic in society. Wangari Maathai’s story is more than that of one woman’s struggles against the negative political and social conditions of her upbringing: it is also the story of Kenya, Africa, and the World. The environment she fights for is the totality of the ecological and social conditions of our being. Her life is a triumph of good over evil.”
–Ngugi wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow

“This is an extraordinary account of an extraordinary woman’s life. The courage, compassion and natural wisdom that shine out from these pages are hugely inspiring for campaigners the world over. And for those who are still struggling to find what ‘sustainable development’ really means in practice, you need look no further than Wangari Maathai’s own life, and the astonishing success of the Green Belt Movement.”
–Jonathon Porritt, Co-Founder and Programme Director of Forum for the Future

“Wangari Maathai's memoir is direct, honest, and beautifully written–a gripping account of modern Africa's trials and triumphs, a universal story of courage, persistence, and success against great odds in a noble cause.”
–Bill Clinton

"Wangari Maathai is a prophet for our time and Unbowed is a call to arms for all of us who feel that the planet is overwhelmed by careless, corrupt or violent leadership.  I have long suspected that the voice to lead us forward would come out of Africa, and it has - a voice of humor, sense, strength and compassion.  Read this book and pass it on."
–Alexandra Fuller

“Wangari Maathai will be the first woman from Africa to be honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize. She will also be the first African from the vast area between South Africa and Egypt to be awarded the prize. She represents an example and a source of inspiration for everyone in Africa fighting for sustainable development, democracy and peace.”
–The Norwegian Nobel Committee, 8 October 2004

“My time with Wangari Maathai made me feel as if I had been given new eyes and an awakened soul . . . . To exude a sense of empowered peace . . . with historic brilliance and heroism while raising three children as a single mother in a country hostile to strong women is almost unimaginable . . . She should be the most celebrated woman in the world.”
–Alexandra Fuller

“What is impressive and important about what Wangari and the Green Belt Movement have done is that they work on the environment in a way that ties it to economic empowerment– lifting people out of poverty. Such creative solutions need our support.”
–Bill Clinton

“Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement demonstrate the intimate connection between sustainable management of Africa’s rich natural resources, democracy, good governance and peace. Such are the solutions that will bring new light to Africa. I hope the world will support her vision of hope.”
–Nelson Mandela