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Knopf
October 2006
On Sale: October 3, 2006
352 pages
ISBN: 0307263487
EAN: 9780307263483
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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