Unbowed

About the book

A remarkable memoir of courage, faith, and the power of persistence, following one woman's journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage.

When Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people's environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and though she was jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, she kept fighting to save Kenya's forests and to restore democracy.

Born in a rural village in 1940, she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education when most girls did not. She studied with Catholic missionaries, earned bachelor's and master's degrees in the United States, and became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya.

Her courage helped move Kenya's government toward democracy, and she went on to serve as assistant minister for the environment and as a member of Parliament. The memoir closes on the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for her "contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace", and on a message of hope through self-sufficiency.