octavia_cade 's review for:

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: A Memoir by William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer

4.0

hopeful inspiring medium-paced

---

What an inspiring read this is! And honestly, it's one that makes me feel a little lazy and incompetent. Kamkwamba, who has to drop out of his first year of secondary school, due to a drought that has catapulted his farming family - his entire country - into starvation and abject poverty, resorts to the local primary school library, trying not to fall completely behind the kids his age who are able to stay on in school. In the library he finds a book about energy, and his inventive brain - the product of a boy who is desperate to be a scientist - uses the book, and the bits of scrap he can find in a local junkyard, to build a windmill that brings electricity to his home. It's absolutely incredible what he manages to accomplish with the most basic resources. Lacking a drill, for example, he forces a nail into a corncob and, using the cob as a handle, heats the nail in a fire, until it's hot and he can push it through metal. 

Thankfully, by the end of the book his innovation has been recognised, and he's not only speaking at a TED talk, but has accrued enough sponsorship that he's able to continue his education. And while it's honestly terrible that he has to be a genius before he's allowed an education - think of all the kids who aren't nearly so lucky, but would still benefit enormously from the same - it's also such a relief to know that this amazing kid and his dream of being a scientist succeed in the end. Because if he didn't... what a criminal waste that would have been. (What a criminal waste it is for any kid to go without like this.)

Also, if this book isn't an argument for the necessity of libraries, I don't know what is.