A bracing natural history of coffee.
Barcelona-based journalist Koehler, who has published previously about tea (Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World’s Greatest Tea, 2015) and contributed to such publications as Saveur, Food & Wine, and the Washington Post, returns with a work about tea’s stimulating cousin. This is no dull deed by a dull writer from a dusty archive—though the author certainly knows his way around an archive—but rather an informative, lively history informed by the author’s visits to key sites, especially in Ethiopia, which, as we learn, is the true home of the Arabica to which so many in the world are devoted. Koehler chronicles his journeys through hazy forests; visits with pickers, growers, brewers, and scientists; the fascinating history of the spread of coffee around the world; the story of the birth and growth of Starbucks and Peet’s; and the connections between failing coffee crops in Central America and the immigration crisis in the United States. Readers will come to understand the deleterious effects of climate change on coffee crops, especially the vulnerability of coffee to the diseases it faces—principally, coffee rust, a fungus. A consistently agile writer, Koehler knows when we’ve had enough of history—and the history of coffee goes way back—and are ready for some time in the woods, a few odd facts, or some sinuous science. We learn, for example, that coffee began as a food rather than drink, that the poet Rimbaud worked on a coffee plantation, and that it takes about 4,000 beans to produce a pound of coffee. Koehler also educates us on genetic mutations—the good, the bad, the ugly—that have affected and likely will affect the nature of our dark liquid companion.
Both an informative work for general readers and a page-turning seminar for would-be writers of narrative nonfiction.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-509-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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