News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

• home
• browse books
• book details:

Unbowed: My Autobiography

by Wangari Maathai - £8.99  Arrow Books (2008)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780099493099 | ISBN 10: 0099493098

'When I was a child, my surroundings were alive, dynamic, and inspiring. Even though I was entering a world where there were books to read and facts to learn - the cultivation of the mind - I was still able to enjoy a world where there were no books to read, where children were told living stories about the world around them, and where you cultivated the soil and the imagination in equal measure.'
 
Born in a rural Kenyan village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most African girls then were uneducated. In her remarkable and inspiring autobiography, she tells of her studies with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelors and master’s degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. She tells of her numerous run-ins with the brutal government of Daniel arap Moi and of 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.
 
Maathai’s extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya’s government into the democracy in which she now serves as Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources and as a Member of Parliament. Eventually her achievement was internationally recognized in the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her ‘contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace’.
 
In Unbowed, we are in the presence of a hugely charismatic yet humble woman whose remarkable story carries with it an inspiring message of hope. Hers is an extraordinary story, spanning different worlds and changing times, and revealing what the courage, determination, tenacity and humour of one good woman can achieve; how as small a thing as planting a seedling and watering it can made all the difference in the world.

"Renowned and admired throughout her native Kenya and across Africa for her pioneering struggle against deforestation and for women’s rights and democracy, selfless and steadfast, Ms. Maathai has been a champion of the environment, of women, of Africa, and of anyone concerned about our future security."
(Kofi Annan)

(Price & availability last checked: June 2018)

Order by email

×

Unbowed: My Autobiography - by Wangari Maathai

Please fill in the order form, & we will reply as soon as we can to confirm your order & tell you how long it will take. Choose between collection from our bookshop or mail-order, for which we charge postage at cost, at current Royal Mail rates

Select type of order: Collect & pay in the shop - I live in or can visit Liverpool Mail-order - send me a card payment link Mail-order - I will pay another way & give details in the notes section

Your name:

Please fill out this field.

Your email address

Please check carefully that you have entered your email correctly

Please fill out this field.

Your phone number (required for order as back-up contact method):

Please check carefully that you have entered your phone number correctly.

Please fill out this field.

Notes (optional - for additional message or information about your order):

Close

Enquire about this book

×

Unbowed: My Autobiography

by Wangari Maathai

Your name:

Please fill out this field.

Your email address

Please check carefully that you have entered your email correctly

Please fill out this field.

Your phone number (optional):

Your message:

Please fill out this field.

(optional) If you are interested in ordering this book, would your order be for collection or mail-order? Select type of order : Collect from the shop - I live in or can visit Liverpool Mail-order - send by post

Close

In booklists: Women and Environmental Issues/Activism, Women and Politics,
In categories: