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From the winner of James Beard, Harriet Tubman, and Whiting Awards, a shimmering and unexpected vision of the world we inhabit together
From the celebrated journalist whose work has been hailed by Tiya Miles as “broad, complex, and unexpected,” and by Publishers Weekly as “informative and compassionate,” award-winning author Jori Lewis’s stunning new book blends scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis in a lyrical literary work that observes the natural world as an entry point into understanding the traumas of our history and the unexplored dimensions of our spiritual lives.
A Natural History of the Spirits offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of plants and animals, we may more deeply understand how we create home.
For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A Natural History of the Spirits grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.
Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and theVirginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. The author of Slaves for Peanuts (winner of a Whiting Award, a James Beard Award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize), Lewis splits her time between Chicago, Illinois, and Senegal.
Praise for A Natural History of the Spirits:
“In this numinous meditation, journalist Jori Lewis turns her gaze to trees, insects, and rocks to decode the traumas and triumphs of the places we call home. By seamlessly blending scientific research, myth, and cultural analysis, she reminds us that the land holds memory, and that our survival requires deep reverence for the seen and unseen.”—Emily Raboteau, author of Lessons for Survival
“This is a quite remarkable book, managing to make the author’s Africa both non-exotic and utterly enchanted. The world felt much larger once I’d read it.”—Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun
“Love, trees, animals, and spirits wend together in this spell of a book. Jori Lewis has pulled off a hypnotic feat by pulling back colonialism’s disfigurements of nature and revealing not just the beauty but the truth that lives behind it.”—Lulu Miller, author of Why Fish Don’t Exist
“Jori Lewis’s beautifully turned essays—about baobab trees, migrating songbirds, tallgrass prairies, and so much more—reveal the hidden histories of landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic, and will make you see your own habitats with new eyes.”—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts