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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.72092
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Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: October 03, 2006
Publishing house: Knopf
Release Date: October 03, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 1063930
Studio: Knopf
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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 very 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.
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Rated by buyers 
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Wangari Maathai is such an inspiration because she is identifiable to so many groups. She is empowering to women, to mothers, to advocates for education, for biology, for equality, and most importantly she is an inspiration to anyone who ever thought their one voice could change the planet. Maathai writes with a sincerity that can be identified in any language! Read this book, to learn about Africa, about plants, about women, about everything. Most importantly read this book to learn about a rather amazing woman who never backed down from a fight for what's right. Let the greenbelt movement, move you.
Rated by buyers -
This person is exceptional, but don't let that stop you from emulating her! She has courage, integrity, and intelligence to spare--and she used it to save her country's ecological health as well as struggling for democracy and the rights of women for equality and dignity. She went through very perilous circumstances, but fortunately for us all, she still continues to this day as a voice for democracy and honesty in government. We need more like her!
Rated by buyers 
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Reviewed by Charles Shea LeMone [...]
Nobel laureate, Wangari Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, in 1940. Her earliest memories of the highland country are of a paradise of fertile soil, lush forests and abundant crops. The land was rich with rivers and streams. However, returning home from college in America, one of the very first things she noticed was how deforestation and the mass cultivation of cash crops had devastated the countryside, causing severe top soil erosion and many creeks and streams to dry up. Furthermore, the people in her region were no longer as robust and strong as she recalled. Instead, having changed their diets to eat like Europeans, they now appeared weak and undernourished. She found the same to be true of the animals that her people raised.
As a professor, a biologist, and a Kikuyu woman, she turned to the women of her country to help restore the decimated forest. Launching the Green Belt Movement to plant trees--more than 30 million since 1977--she was subjected to beatings, arrest and death threats. Nevertheless, she and her women followers remained unbowed. In fact, the discrimination she faced for merely being a woman, led Maathai to question all human rights abuses that the corrupt government was guilty of perpetrating.
She also fought for free elections, which further alienated her in the eyes of the local leaders. Despite all of their efforts to discredit her, though, in 2002, she was elected to Kenya's Parliament. A year later, she was appointed assistant minister for the environment; and in 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She continues to live and work in Nairobi.
On the back cover of "Unbowed a Memoir" there is a quote from former president Bill Clinton. "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 sucess against great odds in a noble cause."
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I agree with the other reviewers about this being an amazing memoir of a brilliant, undaunted woman, and I highly recommend it. I found it intriguing and instructive for other reasons as well: it's an eye opener into Kenya from British colonial times - when the author was a child in an indigenous society close to the land and animals. Her village seems very much like a Native American village surviving (or trying to survive) through missionaries, reservations, racism and harsh, coerced cultural assimilation, etc. Many of her memories are strikingly parallel to my own, growing up in the Arctic in Inupiaq culture colonized by whites but maintaining much of its old collective ways and animistic ties with the land.
The effects of this colonial legacy are still with Kenyans today, for better or worse. Maathai does not romanticize her indigenous, tribal roots. She admits her father beat his wives and Kenyan women had somehow lost their ancient role of authority, but she evenhandedly points out beneficial aspects of polygamy - for example, children were well taken care of and loved with multiple mothers, so she grew up with a powerful sense of security and groundedness. She describes British farmers who were kind and friends with the locals they used as serfs. Life is full of moral ambiguity and she does not deny the good aspect of missionary boarding school where they beat her for speaking her native tongue: it launched her into her a western education and knowledge of the greater world, which she put to such good use.
The memoir continues through the Mau Mau uprising (which was a rebellion against the cruelty of British taking all the good farmland and forcing thousands into far off impoverished reservations, and pitting the many tribes against one another). Maatthai proceeds into current times, always with keen insights into the increasing degradation of the ecosystem with climate change, the introduction of foreign species to turn Kenya into plantations, and the destruction of the old native wisdom/stewardship which helped keep things in balance.
"Unbound" was published before the current conflict that is spiraling into full civil war, with ethnic cleansing and the use of mass rape as a terror instrument. I am sure that Maathai would have plenty to add about this in her memoir if she updates it, with equally keen insights. She would point out that the conflict has its roots in colonial rule and the destruction of a sustainable ecosystem and native life ways, as we see in so many parts of the world now. She would surely have some advice on how to stop the violence.
I really admire this woman, and hope a lot more will read her book. It seems very important!
Rated by buyers -
Maathai is the very first African woman and the very first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize-in 2004.
Masthai's life is inspiring-from her humble beginnings as a child laborer on the plantation of a white English colonial farm with her family, to her early education in the primitive Ihithe primary school at age 8, to further education at St. Cecilia's at the Mathari Catholic Mission, to college in the United States. She taught at the University in Kenya, and was active in the National Council of Women in Kenya (NCWK) for many years.
Many failures are scattered throughout her life: she was divorced by her husband; she lost her job at the University when she tried to run for office, and she was arrested many times for her work in promoting democracy in Kenya. One of the projects she worked on was to stop the construction of a huge 60-story skyscraper in the middle of Uhuru Park in Nairobi; another was to obtain the release of over 50 men who had been imprisoned for agitating for a multi-party system. She held a hunger strike with their mothers, in Uhuru Park, and then they all retreated to a nearby Anglican cathedral to continue to protest after being routed from the park by armed police (Along with many others, Maathai was beaten and taken to hospital). Eventually the men were released.
Maathai started the Green Belt Movement in 1977. In 2002 Kenya finally held free and democratic open elections and Maathai won a seat in the Parliament. See the Green Belt web site for extensive details of her grassroots tree-planting program. The act of planting a tree is helping women throughout Africa help the environment. The GBM has planted more than 40 million trees across Africa, resulting in reduced soil erosion has affecting the critical watersheds
Everyone can make a difference. Just yesterday I watched a report on the news about the devastating drought in the Southeast United States. Hard times are coming. We need to learn about climate change and what we can do to manage it.
Armchair Interviews says: One woman helping other women and her country.
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