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Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
Bottom of the pile
13
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
9/100Critics
16/100Scholars
Author:
Augustine Sedgewick
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
April 7, 2020
Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the worldâone of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's five-hundred-year transformation into an everyday necessity.
What The Reviewers Say
The intricate synergies of coffee and capitalism form the subtext of the historian Augustine Sedgewick’s thoroughly engrossing first book ...'What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?' Sedgewick asks in his early pages. Coffeeland offers a fascinating meditation on that question, by rendering once-obscure lines of connection starkly visible.
... a wide-ranging chronicle of the role of coffee in American culture and commerce and, above all, in the fascinating history of El Salvador, a small country along Central America’s Pacific Coast that is rich in coffee beans but not in traditions of political stability or broad-based property rights.
Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick’s story reaches out into American political history, not to mention the history of American breakfast.
... not relentlessly grim. In its last lap, it strikes some positive notes.
