The Peanut King

Jori Lewis’s book about the simple peanut began simply, with an image both familiar and foreign. When she first visited Senegal’s peanut farms, they looked so much like her family’s Arkansas lands, and yet nothing about the industry — long a staple of Senegal’s $25-billion economy — looked familiar. Peanuts in Senegal were picked by hand, as they had been for centuries. But when one peanut farmer was discriminated against in his village because he was descended from slaves, Lewis went digging. The result is Slaves for Peanuts, a masterwork of narrative nonfiction.

The book tells the story, in part, of the rise of the peanut, which rose like so many other familiar products we rarely think to examine: because of European demand for commercial goods made accessible