# The Green Belt *A Biography of Wangari Maathai* — Legendary Biographies No. 077 - **Subject:** Wangari Muta Maathai - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 185 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 185 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-082-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-160-4) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/077-the-green-belt.html ## About this book She was born on April 1, 1940, in Ihithe village in the Kenyan central highlands, the third of six children of a Kikuyu tenant farmer. She earned a scholarship under the 1960 Kennedy Airlift to Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas, completed her doctorate in veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi in 1971 — the first East African woman to earn a Ph.D. — and founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. By her death in 2011, the movement had planted fifty-one million trees. Solomon Treadway's biography traces the arc through the village school and the Catholic missionary education, the years in Kansas and Pittsburgh, the marriage to Mwangi Mathai and the bitter 1979 divorce, the Karura Forest protests of the Moi years, the 2002 election to the Kenyan parliament, the appointment as Assistant Minister for Environment, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize — the first African woman to win it — and the long final years of organisational consolidation and the ovarian cancer that took her at seventy-one. What emerges is a portrait of an East African environmentalist whose fifty-million-tree movement began with seven seedlings planted on Earth Day 1977 in Karura. ## Contents 1. The Soil 2. The Fig Tree 3. The Kennedy Airlift 4. The Doctorate 5. The Chair 6. The Divorce 7. Seven Seedlings 8. The Women Who Planted 9. The Deforestation Machine 10. Uhuru Park 11. Freedom Corner 12. Karura Forest 13. The Multiparty Wars 14. The Constitution 15. Ninety-Eight Percent 16. The Prize 17. The Ministry and the World 18. The Trees Are Still Growing ## Questions **Who is The Green Belt about?** Wangari Muta Maathai. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Green Belt — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,851 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 58,500 words, 18 chapters, 185 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.