United States Constitution or Unbowed

United States Constitution (SparkCharts)

Author: SparkNotes Editors

SparkChartsTM—created by Harvard students for students everywhere—serve as study companions and reference tools that cover a wide range of college and graduate school subjects, including Business, Computer Programming, Medicine, Law, Foreign Language, Humanities, and Science. Titles like How to Study, Microsoft Word for Windows, Microsoft Powerpoint for Windows, and HTML give you what it takes to find success in school and beyond. Outlines and summaries cover key points, while diagrams and tables make difficult concepts easier to digest. 

This four-page chart summarizes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and amendments 11 to 27 in modern-day English. The original text of the preamble and Bill of Rights are also included. Cross-references and notes are provided where relevant.

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Unbowed: A Memoir

Author: Wangari Maathai

In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence is destined to inspire generations to come.

KLIATT

Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Prize in 2004, recounts her struggles in an inspirational memoir. Born in Kenya in 1940 in a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity or running water, Maathai had to deal with poverty, racism and old traditions including polygamy. She was fortunate in her mother, who protected and supported her in her dreams to become educated and a leader of her people. She began her journey during the '50s at St. Cecilia's Intermediate Primary School, a place safe from the Mau Mau insurgency, which ended when Kenya won its independence from Britain in 1963. Maathai completed her doctorate in 1971 and became the director of the Kenya Red Cross and the Kenya Association of University Women. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, which encouraged rural women to plant trees in order to save the land from the depredations of rampant logging. To date they have planted millions of trees in Kenya. Maathai also became involved in politics, an act that landed her in jail more than once. She married and divorced and lost her beloved mother. Her story is one of rugged determination in the face of opposition and courage in the face of danger. She will be an inspiration to high school students, especially girls. Age Range: Ages 15 to adult. REVIEWER: Janet Julian (Vol. 42, No. 1)

James Thorsen - Library Journal

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kenyan environmental and political activist Maathai, currently an assistant minister in the Ministry for the Environment, Natural Resources, and Wildlife, Kenya, here offers an autobiography written with honesty, humility, and depth. She relates her early interest in the natural world, her formal studies at a Catholic school far from home, the terror as the Mau Mau rebellion began, and her U.S. college studies in biology. Although she encountered incidents of racial discrimination, her U.S. education proved to be a liberating experience. Having earned a master's in biology in 1965, she was asked to return to the newly independent Kenya to work as a lab assistant at the University of Nairobi and complete her Ph.D. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, providing rural women with work planting trees to reforest Kenya, and moved into political activism as well. Her achievements, accomplished as they were in the face of incarceration by those in power, will astonish the reader. Maathai's fairness, activism, and determination to make her country and the continent she loves healthy again are palpable. For all academic libraries as well as public libraries with African collections. [For an interview with Maathai, see "Fall Editors' Picks," LJ9/1/06.—Ed.]