A great American tragedy...with shades of Shakespeare's King Lear.--Heller McAlpin "Christian Science Monitor"

Contains a Mylar Miracle-Pack of intrigue, with everything you'd expect from a long-submerged, intergenerational blue-blooded drama.--Dan Piepenbring "Harper's Magazine"

Who knew that a family empire built on frozen vegetables could produce a tale worthy of Faulkner.--Jim Kelly "Airmail"

The Spinach King makes for juicy...reading.--Roger Lowenstein "Wall Street Journal"

The Spinach King?is a rueful, sure-footed portrait of three generations in pawn to a farm boy's dream. [John] Seabrook's confiding prose and thorough sourcing deliver a genuine capitalist tragedy: ?Lear?among the pea pods.... Divide and conquer?was the Spinach King's maxim, and his short-lived subjugations prove, yet again, how hard it is to be rich and stay human.--Anne Matthews "American Scholar"

John Seabrook wryly details the rise and fall--and Oedipal struggles--of his family's farming empire.... This is a tremendous tale.--John Gapper "Financial Times"

His parents met, shipboard, en route to Monte Carlo for Grace Kelly's wedding. His father relied on a mechanized dry cleaner's rack to separate his formal day wear from his formal evening wear. His grandfather made his mark as 'the Henry Ford of Agriculture.' What happens when a fearless investigative reporter turns his sights on his own storied family? In John Seabrook's case, the answer is magic.--Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

[The Spinach King] becomes a tour of the American twentieth century via frozen vegetables--both World Wars, the Depression, labor struggles, the Ku Klux Klan. John Seabrook, the scion who became a writer, finds the perfect measured tone, leavened by irony and belly laughs, for his weird saga.--William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

John Seabrook's patrimony was an American agricultural empire, or at least the story of it. Like all empires, it was built by brute force. Seabrook pulls no punches in detailing his forebears' unsavory deeds.... This is a deeply personal book that is also a tale of twentieth-century American ingenuity and ambition.--Russell Shorto, author of Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America and Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob

As sweeping in its scope as a great novel.... [The Spinach King is] a rich story, literally and figuratively, populated with characters, including Seabrook himself, that will stay with you long after you finish reading.--Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

John Seabrook's mother told him not write this story, and yet here it is.... Seabrook, like FDR, turns out to be a traitor to his class in the best possible way. And like the Sopranos, it all happened in New Jersey.--Rich Cohen, author of Sweet and Low: A Family Story

[A] tragic and gripping tale: Succession, but make it spinach. With cameo appearances from Zsa Zsa Gabor and the Ku Klux Klan...and an unhealthy serving of money, ambition, and betrayal, Seabrook's memoir reveals the emotional trauma behind your frozen veggies.--Nicola Twilley, host of Gastropod and author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

As the saying goes, behind every great fortune there lies a great crime. ?John Seabrook confronts the crimes of his family--political, economic, personal--with unflinching honesty. The Spinach King is an epic American tragedy, a powerful book about status, wealth, corruption, and succession that reveals much about how our ruling class still behaves today.--Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

[A] propulsive, intergenerational saga with drama to rival King Lear and enough social-climbing audacity to make a Kardashian blush.... This is the tale of a patriarch immolating on the flames of his ambition and the rotten roots of a great American archetype: the self-made man.--Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

The Spinach King is an astonishing tale of American ingenuity, exploitation, and betrayal, pried from the burnished bedrock of family myth by one of the best narrative nonfiction writers of our time.... [An] immensely entertaining, original, unforgettable book.--Janny Scott, author of The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2026-06-02

Length: 368 pages