Review by New York Times Review
CHILDREN are natural environmentalists. Not yet conditioned to separate themselves from the rest of creation, especially from other mobile, noisy, eating and excreting creatures, they delight in all that grows. In awesomely clumsy fashion, they care for anything that is given to them, apt to love too much rather than too little think of a toddler petting a golden retriever and they have an instinctual distaste for desolation. Offer a parking lot or a garden as a play space, and see which gets the love. Somewhere along the way, most of us lose this connectedness; or, as our field of action enlarges, our environmental horizons do not. We disassociate our natural affections from the natural world. Two new picture books about Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, aim to halt that process at just the right moment of child development, when wonder and wider awareness briefly coexist. Sophisticated and humane, these books want to help children's concerns go beyond the local and the fantastical (see "The Lorax," "Wall-E") to a faraway country with problems very dissimilar to our own. Maathai's Nobel was the first given to an environmental activist, for her work in Kenya's Green Belt Movement. She inspired and helped organize the planting of 30 million trees in 30 African countries, and protested destructive growth in Nairobi and elsewhere. Maathai is still at it, currently trying to stop a sugarcane project in a Kenyan delta. These picture books wisely focus on her early career, which affords the clearest story line: a girl who loved trees, and mourned their loss, helped reforest her home. "Planting the Trees of Kenya," written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, tells the story both in wide angle and in detail. Her stippled landscapes feature intricate views of Kenyan farmland, full of women in colorful outfits, and men, women and children bearing seedlings. Nivola explains: "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." Yet this radically democratic message makes "Planting the Trees of Kenya" an oddly personality-free book for a biography. Wangari Maathai's face, never in close-up, is always stoic, and the colors are muted, washed out even before the topsoil is washed away. We are told about the Benedictine nuns who run the American college Maathai attended, and about the conflict between small family farms and "large plantations growing tea for export," but the little girl who loved trees is lost amid all the information. Social movements are necessary for social change, but a poor substitute for individual action in children's books. Jeanette Winter's simpler, more down-to-earth book, "Wangari's Trees of Peace," strikes the balance between fact and child-friendliness. With blocky illustrations and bright colors, Maathai is treated as a friendly icon rather than a subject of realism. (The boat to college in America steams directly from giraffe to Statue of Liberty.) As a child Wangari harvests sweet potatoes with her mother, and after college she gets her knees dirty with first seedlings of her own; she's a role model who makes gardening look like serious, if back-aching, fun. This is a heroine children can relate to. SHE is also one whose story will bring up uncomfortable issues. Men laugh at the women planting trees: '"Women can't do this,' they say. 'It takes trained foresters to plant trees.'" Later, a policeman beats Maathai with a billy club at a demonstration against tree-cutting, with bloody results. These episodes, absent from "Planting the Trees of Kenya," suggest that activism, like planting, is hard work. We see Maathai in jail: "And still she stands tall. Right is right, even if you're alone." She is not alone, as the sequence of planting women on the next page makes clear, but how she gets out of jail remains mysterious. Real-life environmentalism is complicated! That truth presents the greatest obstacle to turning even green-thumbed children into green-acting citizens. But global consciousness has to start somewhere. It is the one plant, the one girl who inspires the lifelong, worldwide change. "We are planting the seeds of hope," Maathai tells the village women in Jeanette Winter's book. The trick is to turn those seeds into a revitalized earth. Simon Rodberg, a writer in Washington, D.C., taught eletnentary and secondary school English for five years.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Like Claire A. Nivola's Planting the Trees of Kenya (2008), this powerful picture-book biography introduces Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. As in Nivola's title, Winter follows her charismatic subject from her rural Kenyan childhood to her adult life as the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which has profoundly improved her country's health and economy. Winter distills Maathai's inspirational story into spare words and images. As in her other similarly formatted picture books, such as The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq (2005), Winter's acrylic paintings employ rich, opaque hues and elemental shapes that illustrate specific details while conveying a broader sense of her subject's remarkable influence. An author's note fills in biographical facts, but children may still have questions about specific events, such as the violent protest battles that leave Maathai bloodied. Paired with Nivola's slightly more comprehensive approach, this title offers a welcome introduction to Maathai's awe-inspiring work and to the subject of activism in general.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement has planted 30 million trees in Kenya, is the subject of Winter's (The Librarian of Basra) eloquent picture biography. Much like Claire Nivola's recent Planting the Trees of Kenya, this work, for a slightly younger audience, introduces Wangari as a child, "liv[ing] under an umbrella of green trees in the shadow of Mount Kenya." The tightly focused text moves quickly without sacrificing impact. Wangari earns a scholarship to study in the U.S., and when she returns after six years, she's stunned--setting down her luggage in a veritable wasteland, extending her palms as if imploring someone to answer her unspoken questions: "What has happened?... Where are the trees?"She plants seedlings in her own backyard--a small start that eventually inspires thousands of others (and, perhaps, the reader) to emulate her. Winter's images appear in framed, same-size squares on each page, creating a flat, frieze-like effect that pays off as Wangari's movement grows and the activities within each frame multiply--a powerful demonstration of Wangari's work. Ages 3-7. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 4-This delightful picture-book biography of the environmentalist has engaging illustrations and accessible, succinct prose. When Wangari Maathai was growing up in Kenya, the land was covered with trees. But on returning to her homeland from America, where she was educated on scholarship, she discovered a hot, dry, barren land, stripped of the trees she loved as a child. Starting in her own backyard, Maathai planted trees and encouraged other women to do the same. More than 30 million trees have since been planted by the members of her Green Belt Movement. Maathai was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004 in recognition of her work. The acrylic illustrations have a warm folk-art influence. The pictures are both literal and symbolic, and framed in complementary lines of color. An author's note and a quote from Maathai are included. This book would be a superb choice for read-alouds or assignments.-Melissa Christy Buron, Epps Island Elementary, Houston, TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai's work to reverse the deforestation of Kenya garners Winter's signature treatment: a spare, reverential text and stylized, reductionist paintings. The present-tense narration posits Wangari's thoughts and inserts unattributed quotations: "Will all of Kenya become a desert? she wonders as her tears fall." "The government men laugh. 'Women can't do this,' they say." Wangari is imprisoned for her actions, but while she is textually and visually depicted in jail and then on the next spread free within the treed landscape, the text makes no mention of her release. Possibly most egregious in this day and age is the image of Wangari standing within an undifferentiated Africa while to the north, Europe is depicted with rudimentary national boundaries. While the effort of producing an intelligible picture-book biography for young children inevitably involves the selection of just a small number of details, this sere distillation is arguably more inspiring story than biography. For a contrast in depth and documentation, see Claire A. Nivola's recent Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai (2008). (author's note) (Picture book/biography. 4-7) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
