George Washington Carver often said that a weed is a flower growing in the wrong place. He might have said this about himself. As the child of slaves, he grew up eager to learn, but was unable to find a school in his neighborhood that would accept black students. It was twenty years before he had enough money saved to go to college, but eventually George Washington Carver became a professor at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There he was able to teach poor farmers the value of plants such as the sweet potato and the peanut - crops that were almost unknown at the time, but for which he invented hundreds of uses. Written and illustrated with affection for "a wonderful man who devoted his whole life to making life better for others," Aliki's biography tells the remarkable story of a great figure in African American history who is now recognized as the most prominent Black scientist of the early twentieth century. This book needs to be returned.