But over many years, as more and more land was cleared, Kenya was transformed. When Wangari returned home from college in America, she found the village gardens dry, the people malnourished, and the trees gone. How could she alone bring back the trees and restore the gardens and the people?Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, says: Wangari Maathai's epic story has never been told better--everyone who reads this book will want to plant a tree!With glowing watercolor illustrations and lyrical prose, Claire Nivola tells the remarkable story of one woman's effort to change the fate of her land by teaching many to care for it. An author's note provides further information about Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement. In keeping with the theme of the story, the book is printed on recycled paper.

    Many of the most famous names and places connected with Africa appear in these pages, including Karen Blixen's farm and Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt on safari. This is a book to delight anyone who has ever traveled to East Africa or been intrigued by its history.

    He turns his back on a successful legal career in London to return to his home in Migwani, a small, poor town in eastern Kenya. His ambition is to assist his country's development, to create a model that others might emulate. But in trying to rediscover his roots and his very identity, old tensions resurface and new battles have to be fought. John gradually finds himself isolated by irreconcilable demands, excluded from his own culture, never fully admitted to the one he adopts. His father seeks proof of his son's integrity and insists that John's daughter be initiated into adulthood, an act that John's wife would never sanction. And when the tensions force the family apart, John finds solace in the company of Janet Rowlandson, a young British volunteer teacher, who becomes more than a friend. It becomes clear that someone will try to force the issue. A Fool's Knot is a sensitive portrait of a man's attempt to reclaim his cultural identity and, at the same time, stimulate change. The contradictions he must confront in his campaign against the grinding poverty of his people lead almost inevitably to conflict.

    It also critically explores efforts on the part of both civil society and the political opposition to reform the state. It analyzes the tortuous efforts since independence to create a sustainable and democratic state.