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
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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