An intriguing account that darkens the depths of that daily cup of joe.
A broad-ranging, often surprising study of the economics and political ecology of coffee.
Drawing alongside such studies as Stanley Mintz’s Sweetness and Power and Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses, Sedgewick, a professor of history and American studies, debuts with an examination of the intersection of people from different parts of the world in forging an extractive colonial economy. One was a Brazilian immigrant to El Salvador who arrived in the mid-1800s and set to work nudging the agricultural economy away from indigo and toward coffee. That deal was sealed with the arrival, decades later, of another immigrant, this one from England. James Hill, writes the author, oversaw the conversion of that agricultural economy to the monocultural production of coffee, with coffee plantations that eventually took up a huge percentage of the country’s arable land. All of this was done in concert with American markets, with the timing just right for the arrival of immigrants to the U.S. who came from coffee-drinking Mediterranean societies. It also appealed to a change of tastes that, in its day, had children both drinking and growing the stuff, with Danish immigrant Jacob Riis observing in New York “men and boys of all ages crowded around one-cent coffee stalls on the street.” Sedgewick casts a wide net in his capably written book, observing, for instance, that liberals in newly independent El Salvador had once made advances to the U.S. to be incorporated as a state. Moreover, he links the rise of the coffee monoculture to the development of an enriched ruling class in that country but also an immiseration of the peasantry: “The transformation of the volcanic highlands into a coffee monoculture transformed the diet of El Salvador’s working people into a flat, featureless landscape of tortillas and beans.” Meanwhile, workers in the U.S. became so dependent on coffee, and so powerful in times of labor shortage, that the coffee break was enshrined in the nation’s culture and remains so today.
An intriguing account that darkens the depths of that daily cup of joe.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59420-615-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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