Seeds of Change: Planting a Path to Peace

Gr 24This entry on Wangari Maathai takes a slightly more comprehensive look at her life than several other recent books. Her deep love of nature and her determination, first to get an education and later to save the environment and ultimately the people of Kenya, are discussed. Foreign business interests and the duplicity of "corrupt police" forced her first into prison, then politics, and ultimately into spreading her message to the wider world. The book closes as she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. An afterword adds more detail on the Green Belt Movement. Vivid colors sparkle from within the thick white outlines in the batik-style illustrations that fill the pages."Carol S. Surges, McKinley Elementary School, Wauwatosa, WI" Copyright 2010 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

With at least three other picture books out about Nobel Prizewinner Wangari Maathai"Planting the Trees of Kenya" (2008), "Wangaris Trees of Peace" (2008), and "Mama Miti" (2010)another volume about the Kenyan activist might seem to crowd a full shelf. This one, though, provides older children with a more thorough investigation of Maathais life. Debut author Johnson includes an account of Maathais training for a doctorate in biology and the obstacles she faced, sets her tree-planting initiative in the context of her political career, and identifies her adversaries as Foreign business people, greedy for more land for their coffee plantations and trees for timber. The highly stylized figures in Sadlers ("Ma Dears Old Green House") scratchboard spreads are outlined in white, lending them a stained-glass feel. Trees, leaves, and water are simplified into elemental shapes, giving the whole the appearance of a tropically colored quilt. Throughout the book runs the image of the Kikuyu peoples sacred "mugumo" tree as the source of Maathais tree-planting project, an idea as small as a seed but as tall as a tree that reaches for the sky. Ages 611. "(May)" Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly Used with permission.