At our last meeting we talked about three books, and were
introduced to a fourth, about Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace
Prize-winning Kenyan woman who was responsible for the creation of the Green
Belt Movement, whose goal is to plant trees in Africa.
We thought Wangari's Trees of Peace was a bit
'clunky' but we liked the colorful, almost-primitive illustratons. We felt the
book would be useful to introduce young children to Wangari's life and work, but
the amount of actual information about her was minimal, and there were many
unanswered questions regarding how the men reacted and her time spent in
jail.
Some of us loved the illustrations by Claire Nivola in Planting
the Trees of Kenya because of their feeling of vastness as they showed how
the trees were destroyed and then re-planted in Kenya. We also liked the
additional specific information that was provided by the Author's Note at the
end. We thought the story was acceptable, and gave good insight into the work
that Wangari did for her immediate community as well as the larger African
landscape, and that it provided a good explanation of how important trees are to
life.
We all agreed that Kadir Nelson's oil paint and fabric
illustrations for Mama Miti were stunning, but we weren't all thrilled
with the text. Some said it almost read like a folktale or a myth, and didn't
really provide enough detail in the text of what really happened -- especially
over a long period of time. We all liked the 'back matter' -- especially the
Glossary of the Kikuyu names for the various types of trees, and the explanation
of how Wangari's work embodied the idea of harambee, the act of working
together for the community.
The fourth book, Seeds of Change, by Jen Cullerton and
illustrated by Sonia Lynn Sadler, was read aloud to us by one of our members. We
all agreed that its text actually presented the most information, especially
about Wangari's childhood and early life as a young girl, and how she was able
to go to school in Africa and then attend college in the U.S. before she
returned to Kenya for her 'life's work'. We also loved the colorful
illustrations, which were easily clear and visible from a distance when it was
read aloud. Many of us thought that the text was a bit too long for a
read-aloud, but that a student reading it alone would get a lot out of
it.
One of our members, a school librarian, stated that she had used
all four books together with students, and that in this way they could compare
and contrast, and they could get the most complete picture of the life of this
amazing woman, who, sadly, died in 2011.
