The Eight-Week March
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Read the opening free
4,851 words · no email, no account
No. 077 · Movements · Civil Rights
The Green Belt
a biography of Wangari Muta Maathai
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Wangari Muta Maathai
- Shelf
- Movements · Civil Rights
- Written by
- Solomon Treadway
- Chapters
- 18 across 185 pages
- Narrated by
- Camille Rhodes
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The SoilRead free
- 02The Fig Tree3,791 words
- 03The Kennedy Airlift4,109 words
- 04The Doctorate2,876 words
- 05The Chair2,834 words
- 06The Divorce3,323 words
- 07Seven Seedlings2,880 words
- 08The Women Who Planted2,472 words
- 09The Deforestation Machine2,919 words
- 10Uhuru Park2,448 words
- 11Freedom Corner3,299 words
- 12Karura Forest2,664 words
- 13The Multiparty Wars2,889 words
- 14The Constitution3,052 words
- 15Ninety-Eight Percent2,723 words
- 16The Prize3,238 words
- 17The Ministry and the World2,773 words
- 18The Trees Are Still Growing3,001 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 58,500 words, 18 chapters, 185 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
