Unbowed: A Memoir
Title | Unbowed: A Memoir |
Publication Type | Book |
Year of Publication | 2006 |
Authors | Maathai, Wangari Muta |
Number of Pages | 314 |
Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
City | New York |
Abstract | In this memoir, Wangari Maathai (1940-2011), 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, Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. The memoir follows her as she studies with Catholic missionaries, earns bachelor's and master's degrees in the United States, and becomes the first woman both to earn a PhD in East and Central Africa and to head a university department in Kenya. The memoir also recounts 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. The author writes of how she 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 how she eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her "contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace." |
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