The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (2009)

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba is an inspiring book narrated by William Kamkwamba himself. I was questioning whether to read this book or not because it sounded a bit boring. I was delighted to find, though, that it was far from dull. This book is about Kamkwamba creating a way to generate electricity, but that part in the book is way less than half of it. I learned about a new culture and enjoyed the African folk tales. Kamkwamba also focused on his life in famine. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it to my peers. ( )

This cross-cultural, engineering biography, shares the story of a boy named William who lives in the village of Malawi. Starvation became a huge issue in his community and without rain, the village's crops where scorched. It also limited his families income, which lead to William having no other choice but to drop out of school. He found to invention of a windmill pumping water and creating electricity and decided to create! He got his creation to work and produce electricity. Years later, he was also able to pump water from the ground with his "green machine."
How to Use - I would use this an introduction to the process of engineering (Having a problem which leads to developing a product) ( )

This is the one book that I think I will force my children to read this year! ( )

This book is about a kid named William. He goes to school but has to drop out when a famine hits Malawi. To continue to provide for his family Williams father takes him out of school (you have to pay for it in most African countries). While his family and him are going hungary he continues to try to teach himself. He learns english so that he can read the books that are in a library. He ends up really enjoying the books about science. One day he reads about a wind farm in California. He decides that he can use that to bring electricity to his house. So he builds his family a windmill. At first nobody thinks it would work but then it does. William uses parts of other random items and builds it for himself.

I thought this book was really well done. It was not a type of book that I would normally read but I really enjoyed it and would read it again. It was interesting and I learned a lot about average life for people in Africa specifically the ones who don't always have enough money for food or school. It was definitely a different type of page-turner then other books. Probably because it was not fiction which meant that it would have a different type of outcome then most fiction books that can go any and every way ( )

A refreshing tale in today’s world of pretensions, a story which comes directly from the author’s heart. This book takes you in a world devoid of basic human necessities, things which are taken for granted by many of us. It gives you a story of survival, of struggle, of victory, of overcoming the boundaries put in place because of ones status at birth.

Apart from being simple and effective in terms of storytelling it also does not let the reader wander away by being cliched or monotonous.

A good read for those who are looking for something different from the regular trope. ( )