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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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