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Title: The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History by Stewart Lee Allen ISBN: 1-56947-174-6 Publisher: Soho Press, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great read, more travelogue than history
Comment: This is a quick and enjoyable book. Although I actually did learn quite a bit about an interesting subject, the book is as much of a travel story as it is the history of a foodstuff that has only become ubiquitous during the last several centuries.
I suspect that the search for the roots of coffee is just an excuse for a jaunt around the world, from the rain forests of Africa, to the bleakest coast of the Arabian peninsula, to an art scam in India, across the Atlantic in a tramp steamer and finally a road trip across America. Well, actually, that's a bit of a simplification--I missed a couple of continents.
It is an entertaining book. The author has a wry sense of humor and is an astute observer of human diversity. He's also something of a free spirit, and I have to wonder if his being stopped by Southern Patrolmen looking for drugs came as more of a surprise to him than to the reader.
The book really does operate at two levels, providing an interesting and informative story about the history of coffee, viewing it through contemporary eyes in the many locations where coffee made its way through history, eventually culminating in Starbucks.
Looking for the perfect cuppa joe? Sounds like a good story. Yeah. We can have some fun with that. Ask the barista for another latte grande and enjoy.
Rating: 5
Summary: Stimulating reading
Comment: Author Stewart Lee Allen takes a wild romp through remote parts of the world in chase of the perfect cup of joe. From Yemen, Ethiopia, to Calcutta and Mysore, to Turkey, Europe, Brazil and finally the US, he takes us on a wild adventure. He proposes that Europe woke from being a backwater with a six-pack a day ale habit when coffee became the drink of choice. Did coffee alter history as well as grumpy morning moods? Well, the American colonists dumped their tea in Boston Harbor, brewed up a cup of caw-fee, and a successful revolution was underway shortly thereafter.
There is a lot about coffee in this book I sure didn't know (like related drinks made of the leaves and cherry husks, monkey dropping coffee and more.) The writing is funny, funny stuff, a lot like Bill Bryson. I recommend this book highly.
Rating: 3
Summary: Psychedelic Monkey Droppings
Comment: Stewart Lee Allen theorizes in THE DEVIL'S CUP that coffee launched history out of the slowly moving, drunken Middle Ages (where each man woman and child consumed the equivalent of a six pack a day) to our current, sober and caffeinated instant. Stewart Lee Allen begins with coffee's obscure beginnings as an Ethiopian religious drug. The legend goes, "an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi one day noticed his best goat dancing about and baaing like a maniac," and the goatherd noticed the berries the goat had eaten, ate them himself, discovered coffee, and forever altered history. This goatherd's bean gradually stimulated history through the industrial revolution and spread of capitalism through the institutions of coffeehouses. Some of the world oldest and most powerful business, such as the East India Company and Wall Street, began as coffeehouses.
Much has changed in the actual preparation of coffee from its pre-historic role as a religious drug to it's present role as a vital nutritional supplement. The Ethiopian perfect cup is prepared in an elaborate coffee ceremony. The hostess roasts green beans at the table, passing around the freshly roasted beans for the gusts to enjoy the aroma, an ode to friendship is offered, the beans are powdered in a stone mortar and then brewed. In the last chapter, Stewart Lee Allen hits the highway, passing through the truck stop riddled South in search of the perfect American cup. He isn't looking for the carefully ground Italian knock-off coffee found in your local strip mall, but true black and palette scalding American Joe. The single most influential coffee recipe in American history involves egg shells and several stages of savagely boiling the beans. He finds this coffee, dumped piping hot out of a round glass carafe drip brewed hours maybe days before, slung down in a porcelain mug and saucer by a dog-tired waitress.
Stewart Lee Allen as the guide along the byways and dead-ends of coffee's scattered trajectory out of Africa develops as a disturbing narrator, off handedly recalling in one scene, in a side track to Calcutta, why he loves the city because when he was working for Mother Teresa, "hand feeding emaciated men one day, carrying out their corpses the next... most people don't understand why I love Calcutta... cheap, dirty, and full of poorly washed people sitting about babbling nonsense." But despite his penchant for observing poverty and human suffering as delightful examples of local color, Steward Lee Allen does dig up many pieces of odd coffee trivia. For instance Steward Allen Lee writes that Japanese companies purchase the entire crop of Blue Mountain Coffee and another high quality specialized ground called Monkey Coffee collected from the droppings of a palm toddy cat that lives mostly an alcoholic bean but also particularly ripe and succulent coffee and its acidic bowls produce a very high grade ground. While THE DEVIL'S CUP is neither a travelogue or coffee history, it has changed the way I drink a cup coffee.
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Title: Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast ISBN: 0465054676 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 25 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger ISBN: 1565845080 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: In the Devil's Garden : A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen ISBN: 0345440161 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Perfect Cup: A Coffee Lover's Guide to Buying, Brewing and Tasting by Timothy James Castle ISBN: 0201570483 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1991 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Lynn Alley ISBN: 158080070X Publisher: Burford Books Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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