Jeanette Winter’s Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa (Harcourt Books, 2008), is featured as a new review in our current issue of PaperTigers and I very much look forward to seeing this version of Wangari Maathai’s story as I love both Jeanette Winter’s illustrations and her turn of phrase.

We have recently read instead, as part of our PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, another version of the same true story, which also came out last year – Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai, written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). It was recommended to me by the wonderful Willesden Bookshop in London, and I’ll be blogging about my visit there soon! Like Wangari’s Trees of Peace, Planting the Trees of Kenya tells the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s campaign to save the landscape of Kenya and, through the foundation of her Green Belt Movement, to enable people to help themselves.

It begins, just as a book aimed at a young audience should, with her childhood and progresses through her time as a student in the US, to the changes she discovered in the landscape of Kenya when she returned. My two were so engrossed that Little Brother immediately took in the disastrous implications of Wangari standing in the midst of agricultural workers, gazing at the stump, which was all that remained of her beloved, sacred fig tree. However, Wangari did not just sit down and lament. She began by urging the women around her to plant trees:

Many of the women could not read or write. They were mothers and farmers, and no one took them seriously. But they did not need schooling to plant trees. They did not have to wait for the government to help them. They could begin to change their own lives.

As the results of their labor began to be apparent, the men stopped laughing and joined in. Wangari took her campaign into schools, prisons and even the army – and so the story ends with the staggering statistic that thirty million trees have been planted in Kenya in the last thirty years.

Nivola recounts Wangari’s story simply and includes all that is necessary to inspire young readers to be young activists for the future of their planet. Her panoramic landscapes illustrate the story eloquently, whether in the lush greens of a fertile land or the arid orange of bare, deforested soil – and the people, whose bright clothing is in perfect counterpoint to the background, provide endless extra details for eager young eyes. An Author’s Note brings Wangari’s story up to the present, as well as giving some examples of the work of The Green Belt Movement (who also have a blog…). My two (10 and not-quite-8) were old enough to absorb this and it helped them to make that leap from an inspiring story to it being a true inspiring story. I can see this beautiful book coming out again and again. And now we’re looking to sign up to the UN’s Billion Tree Campaign…

Posted by: Marjorie | This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Reading Aloud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: Billion Tree Campaign, Books at Bedtime, Claire A. Nivola, Green Belt Movement, Jeanette Winter, Kenya, Planting the Trees of Kenya, reading aloud to children, Reading the World Challenge, Wangari Maathai, Wangari's Trees of Peace, Willesden Bookshop