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    The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition
    Unavailable
    The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition
    Unavailable
    The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition

    Written by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

    Narrated by Korey Jackson

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The bestselling story of the young inventor who brought electricity to his Malawian village, now in an accessible middle grade edition

    When a terrible drought struck William Kamkwamba's tiny village in Malawi, his family lost all of the season's crops, leaving them with nothing to eat and nothing to sell. The family was starving, and they could hardly find money for food, let alone school fees. Forced to drop out, William began to explore the science books in his village library. There, he came up with an idea that would change his family's life forever: he could build a windmill. Made out of scrap metal and old bicycle parts, William's windmill would bring electricity to his home and help his family pump the water they needed to farm the land.

    Retold for a middle grade audience, this inspiring memoir shows how, even in a desperate situation, one boy's brilliant idea can light up the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateFeb 5, 2015
    ISBN9781501227967
    Unavailable
    The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition
    Author

    William Kamkwamba

    William Kamkwamba is a New York Times bestselling author and innovator who designs development projects, including safe water delivery and educational access. William tells his journey of how he achieved his dream of bringing electricity, light, and the promise of a better life to his family and his village in his memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, co-authored with Bryan Mealer. Since its debut, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind has sold more than 1 million copies and has been translated into nearly twenty languages worldwide. It has been published in two additional editions, a young reader’s version and a children’s book. After graduating from Dartmouth College in Environmental Studies, William began work as a Global Fellow for the design firm IDEO.org. He is an entrepreneur, TED Fellow, and has worked with the WiderNet Project to develop appropriate technologies curriculums focused on bridging the gap between “knowing” and “doing” for young people in Malawi and across the world. William splits his time between the U.S. and Malawi and is currently working full-time with the Moving Windmills Project to bring the Moving Windmills Innovation Center to life in Kasungu, Malawi.

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    Reviews for The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

    4/5

    449 ratings93 reviews

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    • 5/5
      My 12 year old nephew suggested this one for me--I thought it would be a nice, straightforward account of a boy who built a windmill ... but it turned out to be one of the more moving experiences I've had reading this year. There's a harrowing longish sequence in the middle involving famine which gives the rest of the book its emotional gravitas.

      It certainly makes me feel privileged to be so blasé about things like the Internet, Starbucks, sandwiches, etc. Malawi is a very different place--more different than I would have thought prior to reading the book. Very much recommended.

      (Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
    • 5/5
      An inspiring book about a young boy who's family was too poor to afford school, so he checked out books from the library to teach himself. Through books he learned about electricity and eventually built a wind generator for his parent's farm. It makes you aware of how many opportunities and resources we have in the United States that are just taken for granted.
    • 4/5
      This is a story about a young boy, William, who sees a problem and works to solve it. Early in the story the reader is introduced to the setting: a small village in Malawi, Africa. William is always dreaming of creative inventions and asking questions about machines and other technologies he sees on a day-to-day basis. Growing up working in the fields, harvest season is vital for the survival of his family and community. As harvest season began, the lack of rain and abundant amount of sun scorched the fields leaving everyone with no food. One day, William found the energy and passion to go to a local library (created by Americans) to see if he could create something to solve the problem: no water. He discovers through his readings that if he can make a pinwheel then it can produce electricity to pump the water they needed. William and a few friends worked together to create a pinwheel and tested it to see if it could create electricity. After some testing, he finds out it is a success and creates more in order to save the harvest and his community.
    • 3/5
      The nonfiction book by Malawi author William Kamkwamba about his youth in the small African country where his family farmed maize at the mercy of drought and poverty. William wanted to go to school and learn science but because of the drought and loss of the crop he could not pay the fees. William did not give up but would study from science books from a small library. He used junk to build his first windmill and wired his parents home with electricity that could run small amount of lights. It is an interesting book that looks at a country that makes repurposing a way of life. They recycle junk all the time. Not like life where appliances are built to be thrown away every 6 years if you're lucky to get that much out of it. I can't say that I got into the electricity so much. It just isn't my interest but I was inspired by this young man who never quit trying and his desire to make things better for his country.
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting look at a determined boy who built a windmill from junk parts to help pump water for his family and neighbors. His ingenuity earned him entrance to Dartmouth to study engineering. Heart-warming and inspirational.
    • 5/5
      A touching story.
    • 5/5
      Great story and so inspirational- great read for young and old!
    • 4/5
      Excellent story about a boy in Africa who overcame great challenges to work towards a better life for him and his family.
    • 5/5
      Inspiring! Beautiful! Loved every single moment. Way to go Kamkwamba!
    • 4/5
      This was much more than I thought it would be. I expected to read the story of how a young man designed and built a windmill out of scraps. What I did not know was that I would learn about the culture and struggles of the people of Malawi. This was a great read.
    • 4/5
      Very readable book. I learned a lot about the country of Malawi (and Africa in general). I also was super impressed by the main character. I must admit I skimmed over some of the more scientific information because I didn't work that hard to understand how he built the windmill and the other inventions.
    • 5/5
      The best book ever I love it get your relatives to read this book so good

    • 5/5
      I didn’t realize this was an early reader edition, I’m curious as to how it compares with the original. But! I am really glad that I listened to this version because now I want my kids to listen to it! The audio is brilliant and makes the story compelling to young readers and adults alike. Highly recommend. It’s a true story and I am in awe of Williams outlook and resilience.
    • 5/5
      This is a really inspiring story of famine and energy, struggles and successes. William Kamkwamba is a Malawian who along with his family suffers under a famine - but is a natural tinkerer and becomes inspired to build a windmill to generate electricity and pump water for irrigation after reading some physics texts in a local village library when he is forced to drop out of school due to poverty. William successfully builds his windmill, becomes famous, and connects with other inventors as a TED Fellow. Really powerful stuff. Ghost written (William admits he doesn't know English well), but well told anyway. Recommended. I heard about this book on The Daily Show and am glad I got it and got around to reading it. Fast read - about half of it in a day or so.
    • 5/5
      Excellent - I enjoyed listening to this book with my family.
    • 5/5
      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)
    • 5/5
      I listened to this with my students and they loved it!
    • 4/5
      An incredible first-hand story of a young boy in Africa who overcomes many obstacles to see his dream come true. Along with the auto-biographical recollections, we also get a glimpse into the social, cultural, and political realities faced by Kamkwamba, his family and his community. The story of the windmill comes later in the book and at times seems to have to fight its way into prominence within the book among all the other recollections. That is fitting, however, because it symbolizes Kamkwamba's own struggle within his circumstances to accomplish what he set out to do. Famine, death, poverty, lack of formal education,superstition, political corruption. Despite all these forces that seem to conspire against him, this fourteen-year-old boy is still able to harness his own creativity, imagination, and will of spirit to build his windmill and offer something of worth to his village, electricity and hope for a better future.
    • 5/5
      An inspirational story of a determined young genius. William Kamkwamba tells his remarkable story with patience and honestly. It is not until half way through the book that he gets to his invention of the windmill that changed his life. Without the back story that helps us understand his setting and his family, the rest of the book would not have context. The story of the famine in Malawi is in itself worth the purchase price of this book. The painstaking description of his family gradually running out of food is as riveting as anything I've read. Often the book does not live up to the story, but this an exception. A truly remarkable book.
    • 4/5
      I was intrigued by this book. I liked the way William was honest about himself, his country and the things that happened to him. His writing was quite humble and I could not help but identify with him and sympathize with him.How can one read this book and not be thankful for all the things we take for granted? We flip a switch and a light comes on. We turn a tap and clean, drinking water comes out. We flush a toilet and our waste is taken away. Things we take for granted he sees as wonderful luxuries.I admire the way William sought out his own education when his father could not pay for his schooling. Would that children in this part of the world were as eager to learn. The question then becomes, how do we build this eagerness in the children here in Canada?Thank you, William for your positive message and example.
    • 3/5
      This is a moving and inspiring story that would have been even better with some tighter editing. I had read so many glowing reviews of this book that I was rather surprised to find myself bored about 2/3 of the way through. True, the descriptions of the famine were horrifying while the accounts of of William's ingenuity were amazing. But the repetitive narrative and overly simple tone were getting a little tedious. But I kept reading because I decided that the ending of this book must be so fantastic that every single reviewer must have forgot about the tediousness of reaching that ending. I was right. It was amazing to see little William Kamkwamba go from village tinkerer to International speaker, and just like the other reviewers I was feeling a little starry eyed about this book. But I would be doing a disservice to potential readers if I let my final impression of the book cloud my initial impression. I truly wish the writing were just a little bit better because it is a book that I would love to recommend to teenagers as an inspiring story about innovation and the value of education. As it is, I would worry that all but the strongest readers would give up before they got to the really good part. P.S. As a librarian, I especially love the fact that William got his initial idea for building a windmill from a book he checked out at the local library.
    • 5/5
      Amazing story that students can engage with and learn from. A absolute must read!
    • 4/5
      An inspirational read, with fascinating information about daily life in Malawi. I appreciated the cultural info as much as the story. It would make a good read-aloud book for school-aged kids too. The electrical info would probably go over their heads, but some of it went over mine, so it doesn't really matter.
    • 3/5
      Very interesting, but could have benefited from better editing of story.
    • 5/5
      AMAZING, AMAZING, AMAZING!!This is a real eye-opener of a book. Not only did the author bring electricity to his village, and eventually water, but he also lived through extreme famine after floods removed the year's crops. With only a small lump of maize meal bread between his whole family per day he struggled on, raising a crop for the following year.William Kamkwamba is a young lad with a thirst for knowledge; from a young age he took radios apart and ressembled them, eventually earning himself a few kwacha repairing neighbours' radios. Sadly his family could not afford to continue his schooling at secondary level, so he went to the small library in his village and taught himself physics. He then used his learning to build a prototype windmill to see if he could produce electricity - it worked! Form there grew the larger windmill from which he produced 'electric wind'. But none of this involved pieces of machinery that we would buy in the local shops - William had to form his sails from cut up pipes, his dynamo from an old bike and his supports from chopped down Blue Gum trees.Nothing was easy, yet he persevered in spite of ridicule and disbelief.This is a book truly worth reading, a young man still working towards bettering his country, bringing basic needs to a impoverished people.READ IT!If you Google William Kamkwamba you will find an interesting blog, a speeech given by WK on video and an opportunity to give financially to rebuild the primary school that William attended - originally attended by about 400 but now with 1,400 pupils, no desks, no light, leaking rooves.......
    • 5/5
      I had intended to give The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind maybe three and a half or four stars, but now that I have finished it through tears, I think it deserves five. William Kamkwanba has written the story of present-day Malawi and of his life as a small farmer's son in a small central Malawian village. I'm guessing that the reading level is about sixth grade, and the book feels like one of those High Interest/Low Level books that schools buy for high school students who don't read well. Nevertheless, the story makes putting up with the naive narration worthwhile - and, in fact, since William didn't learn much English until he was a young adult, even that is amazing.Anyone who wants to know about Malawi should read this book. William's life was a strange mixture of Christianity and belief in witches and other superstitions. He worked hard on a subsistence farm with his father until a drought in 2001 brought famine in 2002. At this point the laundry list language becomes completely authentic and eloquent. Those 75 pages about famine taught me more than any television program ever has. William's family survived both because they had a little more than many people going into the famine and because his parents were smart enough and enterprising enough to risk their remaining food stores at the crisis to sell little cakes for enough money to buy new meal each day to feed themselves and make more cakes. However, when the rains came and a new crop was finally harvested, William's father had too many debts to send William to secondary school.At that point at fourteen, William discovered a small, local library and began to read the books which changed his life. He had always been curious about science, and with Explaining Physics in hand, he conceived the idea of building a windmill to provide electric lights for his family's home. His scientific explanations made as much sense to me as anybody else's (by which I mean, "not a lot"), but his ingenuity and determination left me breathless. This was a windmill made from PVC pipe heated and then hammered flat; of a nail heated red-hot and used to bore holes in metal; of a nail wound about with copper wire for an electromagnetic coil; rubber from cast-off flip-flops for a wall-switch. His eventual success eventually brought him international recognition and an opportunity to pass on his technology to his neighbors in his village.By book's end William was in South Africa in school with plans to use everything he learned for his family and his country. Like the delegates to a technological convention that he attended, I am inspired by his message, "And I try, and I made it."(Thank you, LT for this inspiring book!)
    • 4/5
      Many young African men are unable to attend school because they lack the money or are needed to work at home but one did not wait for the education to come to him - he sought it out. William Kamkwamba's family lived off the corn and crops they raised themselves. Every year they would plant the seeds in time for the rains to water them, hope that the rain would last long enough for the corn to grow, harvest and store the corn and pray it would last until the next harvest. They carried water from the village well and had no electricity. This was the way most people live in their part of Africa.William attended the free primary school and looked forward to studying science, particularly physics, in secondary school. Unfortunately, a drought hit the year he was to go and his family, barely making it through, could not afford to pay for the school. He made use of a local library, stocked with books sent from America, to try to keep up with his studies so that he could eventually return to school with his friends. While studying a book on electricity, he learned how to build a wind generator in order to light his home. He rummaged through junk piles to find parts and worked to save money for a dynamo until he successfully installed one light in his house. He continued to improve his system by installing a brake on the windmill, a battery to save energy for when the wind died, and a circuit breaker to prevent fire caused by the make-do wiring. His next project was to build a wind mill to pump water from a well to allow his family to plant more crops. He never lost his desire to return to school.William's creation was noticed by some visitors to the primary school and they notified their supervisor who notified the national radio network. William became famous and eventually was invited to speak at a conference and went on to improve his English in England and even fly to the U.S. This book opens with William's stories of his childhood and descriptions of his everyday life and we get a detailed account of the ravages of the drought and famine. While one light in a house means nothing to us, it meant everything to him and it opened a whole new life for him and his family.This book, like Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea, helps us see how important education is and reminds us that we should not take it for granted.
    • 5/5
      From poverty comes invention!! A must read for those of us in North America who have never known starvation!
    • 5/5
      In the LDS Church, we are encouraged to fast for two consecutive meals on the first Sunday of every month. It's not just 'going hungry' - we are to ask for spiritual help with something, or to bless someone else, and to pray for an increased measure of the Spirit as we fast. Then we take the money we would have spent on those meals and donate it to the Church for the support of the poor in our area. I must admit that I am not great about following this practice. We have always been faithful in the payment of our fast offerings, donating as much as we could, much more than the cost of the food itself, whenever we can. But the going without food part is hard for me.This weekend I grabbed a library book that will forever change how I look at the fast. It's called "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," by William Kambewamba. William grew up in the African nation of Malawi, the son of a farmer. His family would grow maize, or corn, and tobacco every year, milling the food they needed for themselves and using the money they earned to provide for their needs for the year. One year they had planted their maize, as usual, but the rains didn't come. For weeks the crop struggled along, with the seeds barely breaking through the soil. Then the rains came, but all once. The seeds were washed away in a flood. William's family planted again, but they couldn't afford fertilizer and the crop didn't have enough time to grow before the harvest. The entire nation was affected.His family got their grain milled, one bag at a time, but they had only five bags to last them all year. At first, they hoped that the government would come through with the food they needed. But instead, corrupt officials sold what grain they could and the surplus disappeared. So people starved. When the grain was almost gone, the hungry people took the husks of the corn, the green part I throw away every time I cook corn, and ground that up and ate it. When it began to run out, they mixed the husks with sawdust and at that. They ate the leaves of the pumpkin vines. They even ate the seed corn, scrubbing off as much insecticide as they could. William's family saved their seed corn, but they were down to a tablespoon of food or so a day. Then it was time to plant. With their bellies aching from hunger, and sometimes too dizzy to stand and temporarily blinded, they found the strength to plant their seeds. And then they prayed. The rains came, and the people had food again.As I read William's story, and his desperate attempts to gain an education and break this cycle of subsistence farming, I found myself thinking about my cupboard full of food. All those stories of 'children starving in Africa' and how I needed to clean my plate ran through my head. And yet, what would William have done with my breakfast cereal, my mashed potatoes and meat loaf, my tuna casserole? They wouldn't have even known what it was, much less how to cook it.Last night I prepared for my fast today with a completely different attitude. It wasn't that by fasting I could somehow bless those who are hungry in tiny nations across the world. It wasn't even that I could somehow alleviate the hunger of those in this country. It was because I needed to remember that food is a blessing, that I am lucky to have enough to eat. If we run out of food and money again, I know that I can count on my church, on my government, on my family. The stores have plenty of food. But over the history of the world, most people were not that lucky. So my fast becomes an act of gratitude that I am blessed, and a reminder that I need to help others who are not so lucky.This was an amazing book. William's father ran out of money so could not pay for his son's education. William had to quit school and go to work on the farm. He tried to keep up with what his classmates were learning and found the local library. There he found books on electricity, physics, and energy. He decided to build a windmill. He scrounged parts from the junkyard, took apart radios and engines, and got help from his friends, but he succeeded. He was able to use his windmill to provide energy for little light bulbs in his house so he could see to read at night. Soon word of his project got out and he attracted the attention of journalists and scientists. They helped him make his windmill stronger and safer, dig a well so his family could have clean water, replace his grass roof with a tin one, and provide electricity for his entire village. It is an amazing story of determination and triumph over adversity that will inspire anyone. And it changed the way I look at what I have. I have a cupboard full of food, clean water with the turn of the faucet, a sturdy house, electricity and heating, a way to keep myself and my clothing clean. I am not afraid of soldiers with guns taking what I have. I can send my children to school for free. I can go to the doctor when I am sick.I am blessed. And I need to remember that.
    • 4/5
      What a powerful example of the human spirit! William describes both the horror of living through a famine and the persistence and creativity that he displayed in learning how to apply science to making his life better. Reading of the conditions of William's life drove home to me just how fortunate we are to live in America and how it will be people like William that will make the changes needed in his country.