A tasty, stimulating look at the coffee business that pairs canny life lessons with caffeinated connoisseurship.
A coffee impresario looks back on his long love affair with great beans in this rousing memoir.
Franklin, host of the Archaic World podcast, recaps his career as founder of the DoubleShot Coffee Company, a celebrated cafe and gourmet coffee-roasting operation in Tulsa. After much do-it-yourself experimentation roasting his own beans, the author realized that people might pay for coffee that tastes good without milk and sugar and embarked on a shoestring startup odyssey—scrounging for money, working endless hours, gaining skills and savvy, and almost going to war over soured business deals. (“I met with him in person at the construction site, sat him down, and paced around in front of him with my red baseball bat, insisting that he finish the job and stop lying to me.”) The book also serves as a colorful, sometimes dramatic travelogue of Franklin’s journeys in search of exotic beans from India to Guatemala, where he encountered coffee growers who had formed a death squad to kill bandits who were trying to extort them and was himself robbed at gunpoint. The work is also a testament to one man’s uncompromising, almost religious commitment to fresh-roasted brew that transcends the desire for profit. (Franklin once sternly confiscated a customer’s espresso and refunded his money because he took too long sipping it and thus allowed the evanescent flavors to dissipate.) The author’s reminiscences expose the commercial niceties and corruptions of the coffee business—like payola scams in which coffee critics confer stellar reviews in exchange for lucrative “sponsorships” by coffee companies—while diving deep into the art and science of creating great coffee in richly redolent prose. (“The final temperature is absolutely crucial. One degree less and the coffee tastes grassy. One degree more and the coffee tastes burnt.”) Franklin’s color photos of verdant coffee plantations and atmospheric cafes offer a vibrant visual accompaniment to the text. People in the trade as well as coffee afficionados of all stripes will savor the result.
A tasty, stimulating look at the coffee business that pairs canny life lessons with caffeinated connoisseurship.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9798999320100
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Native Design Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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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