Since its discovery in an Ethiopian rainforest centuries ago, coffee has brewed up a rich and troubled history, according to Uncommon Grounds, a sweeping book by business writer Mark Pendergrast. Over the years, the beverage has fomented revolution, spurred deforestation, enriched a few while impoverishing the many, and addicted millions with its psychoactive caffeine. Coffee is now the world's second most valuable legal commodity, behind oil, according to Pendergrast, who is also author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola.

"A good cup of coffee can turn the worst day tolerable, can provide an all-important moment of contemplation, can rekindle a romance," he writes. "And yet, poetic as its taste may be, coffee's history is rife with controversy and politics." For example, coffee bankrolled Idi Amin's genocidal regime in Uganda and the Sandinistas' revolution in Nicaragua. Uncommon Grounds provides some fascinating tidbits. Did you know that coffeehouses helped spawn the French and American revolutions? Or that coffee supplanted alcohol as a favorite breakfast drink in Britain in the late 1600s, and later became a patriotic American beverage after the Boston Tea Party? Pendergrast also details the rise and fall of regional coffee brands in the United States, the role of advertising in the industry, the global economic impact of coffee prices, and the recent emergence of specialty-coffee retailers--Starbucks, for example. Finally, he explores the social and environmental ramifications of coffee and highlights recent attempts to encourage a livable wage and environmental protection in coffee-producing nations such as Brazil. Pendergrast also includes an appendix on "how to brew the perfect cup." This wide-ranging book is a good read for those curious about the history and context behind that morning cup of coffee, as well as for those strictly interested in the business side of the industry. --Dan Ring


From Publishers Weekly
Caffeinated beverage enthusiast Pendergrast (For God, Country and Coca-Cola) approaches this history of the green bean with the zeal of an addict. His wide-ranging narrative takes readers from the legends about coffee's discoveryAthe most appealing of which, Pendergast writes, concerns an Ethiopian goatherd who wonders why his goats are dancing on their hind legs and butting one anotherAto the corporatization of the specialty cafe. Pendergrast focuses on the influence of the American coffee trade on the world's economies and cultures, further zeroing in on the political and economic history of Latin America. Coffee advertising, he shows, played a major role in expanding the American market. In 1952, a campaign by the Pan American Coffee Bureau helped institutionalize the coffee break in America. And the invention of the still ubiquitous Juan Valdez in a 1960 ad campaign caused name recognition for Colombian coffee to skyrocket within months of its introduction. The Valdez character romanticizes a very real phenomenonAthe painstaking process of tending and harvesting a coffee crop. Yet the price of a tall latte in America, Pendergrast notes, is a day's wage for many of the people who harvest it on South American hillsides. Pendergrast does not shy away from exploring such issues in his cogent histories of Starbucks and other firms. Throughout the book, asides like the coffee jones of health-food tycoon C.W. PostAwho raged against the evils of coffee and developed Postum as a substitute for regular brewAprovide welcome diversions. Pendergrast's broad vision, meticulous research and colloquial delivery combine aromatically, and he even throws in advice on how to brew the perfect cup. 76 duotones. Author tour. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this enlightening sociocultural chronicle, journalist Pendergrast (For God, Country & Coca-Cola) focuses on the popularity of coffee, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Coffee-drinking came late to the New World but was embraced almost immediately. It accompanied settlers on their way west (Native Americans referred to it as "black medicine") and was popular with soldiers in the Civil War and both world wars. Pendergrast's book is filled with stories about the rise (and fall) of coffee dynasties like Hills Brothers and Folgers and of how the fledgling advertising industry helped promote each. The book concludes with the advent of specialty firms like Starbucks. While it lacks the extensive industry overview that characterizes Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger's The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop (LJ 4/1/99), it provides substantial background on coffee production as well as making an entertaining yet serious attempt to understand the popularity of the beverage. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.ARichard S. Drezen, Washington Post News Research Ctr., Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Betty Fussell
With wit and humor, Pendergrast has served up a rich blend of anecdote, character study, market analysis and social history.


From Scientific American
Coffee, one learns in this scholarly and entertaining book, was the subject of an early skirmish in the struggle for women's rights. In 1674, when coffeehouses were the rage in London but admitted only men, a pamphlet entitled The Womens Petition against Coffee appeared. It declared that "Excessive Ube of that Drying, Enfeebling Liquor" sapped the sexual vigor of men, causing "Grand Inconveniences" to women. That pamphlet provoked another: The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition, "Vindicating Their own Performances, and the Vertues of their Liquor." Pendergrast describes himself as a journalist and scholar. The scholar has done an enormous amount of research, evidenced by a bibliography running to more than 34 closely printed pages and a list of 244 people whom he interviewed. The journalist has produced a splendid tale, setting out all one could hope to know about coffee.


Wall Street Journal
"A focused and juicy history of our last legal and socially acceptable drug."


From Booklist
Pendergrast's sprightly, yet thoroughly scholarly, history of America's favorite hot beverage packs the pleasurable punch of a double espresso. From the drink's origins in sixth-century Ethiopia through the Arab introduction of coffee to Europe in the sixteenth century, the brown infusion has generated passion and intrigue. Tropical New World nations became economically (and politically) tied to a volatile market manipulated by financiers far from their shores. Pendergrast vividly sketches an amazing cast of characters created by the coffee trade, notably Hermann Sielcken, a coffee monopolist, and C. W. Post, who founded an empire promoting a coffee substitute. Pendergrast also limns the mutual growth of America's grocery chains and the nation's advertising industry, which created some of the earliest demand for brand-name products. As baby boomers matured, postwar expansion of specialty coffee roasters burgeoned in the eighties and yielded the mighty Starbuck's empire and those ubiquitous green and white paper cups that rival McDonald's arches as contemporary cultural icons. Mark Knoblauch


From Kirkus Reviews
An exhaustive, admirably ambitious examination of coffee's global impact, from its roots in 15th-century Ethiopia to its critical role in shaping the nations of Central and Latin America. Pendergrast (For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, 1993) explains almost everything we'd ever want to know about coffee. The story begins in the mountains of Ethiopia, where goat herders first discovered the pleasures of the coffee bean. Arab traders helped spread coffee to Europe, where it became a 17th-century sensation. Soon the imperial powers of Europe established coffee plantations from Java (a Dutch colony) to Brazil (a Portuguese colony) to Haiti (a French colony), enslaving the indigenous populations. Even after freeing themselves from centuries of imperial control, the coffee-growing nations remained under ``coffee oligarchies'' that exploited local peasants. Today, most coffee workers ``live in abject poverty without plumbing, electricity, [or] medical care.'' Afraid of leftist rebellion in Latin America and eager for low-cost coffee, the US has actively supported these oligarchies. Pendergrast does a fine job exploring the disturbing economic inequalities behind every cup of coffee. He also analyzes how the boom-and-bust cycles of the coffee harvest have destabilized nations like Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica. After WWI, coffee emerged as a major American industryadvertising helped turn Maxwell House, Folgers, and Hills Brothers into household names. With intense competition, coffee quality was often sacrificed for low price. By the 1960s, coffee quality was so low that a ``gourmet'' coffee movement emerged, led by purists such as Alfred Peet. While the ``gourmet'' coffee movement reacted against bland, mass-produced coffee, it's now identified with a corporate giant called Starbucks, whose aggressive tactics Pendergrast skillfully describes. Should be read by anyone curious about what goes into their daily cup of Javatoo often, good coffee isn't good for the people who produce it. (60 b&w photos) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Publishers Weekly
"Pendergrast's broad vision, meticulous research, and colloquial delivery combine aromatically..."

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
You'd be hard pressed (or, perhaps, French pressed) to find a bad cup of joe in this day and age. You can fill up with an espresso while your car fills up at the local gas station, or drink a latté while perusing the shelves at your favorite bookstore.

The world consumes an average of 2.25 billion cups of coffee a day, and the United States drinks one-fifth of that. And with Starbucks introducing specialty coffee across the globe, even the English — as renowned for their bad coffee as we are for our bad tea — have modified their ways to serve up a proper mug of the steaming potion.

While coffee is hardly a new beverage, the culture associated with it has reemerged as a way of life in the last ten years. First discovered in the rainforests of Ethiopia in the 6th century C.E., coffee beans were initially considered a food by the Galla tribe, who crushed them, rolled them into balls with animal fat, and used them as an energy boost. It wasn't brewed into a drink until 500 years later, and another 500 years passed before the first coffeehouse opened. Today, coffee is the second most valuable legal commodity on earth (oil is the first), and Starbucks Coffee, the definitive leader in the specialty roaster market, is pulling in as much as $3 million a day from their 2,000 stores worldwide.

If that caffeine buzz is making you thirsty for knowledge about coffee, here are two new books certain to quench it — The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, and Uncommon Grounds: The HistoryofCoffee and How It Transformed the World by award-winning business writer Mark Pendergrast. For a brief social history, filled to the brim with anecdotes, informative sidebars, and illustrations, The Coffee Book provides an exuberant and comprehensive survey documenting everything from the discovery of the coffee bean to the rise of café society. Dicum and Luttinger, co-owners of Fair Trade Zone, an ecologically responsible importing and wholesaling company, also offer a deft analysis of the industry at large and explain the cultivation, harvesting, and roasting processes.

Coffee was initially believed to be a medicament. By the late 16th century, European travelers to the Middle East described it in their journals, noting its frequent use as a remedy for stomach maladies. But the aromatic and savory pleasures were not lost on coffee drinkers, and soon cities like Constantinople, Cairo, and Mecca opened the first coffeehouses. They quickly became cultural epicenters where habitués gathered to play chess and review the news of the day.

Though coffee remained a monopoly of the Arab world, the increase in European travelers to the Middle East, and the expansion and integration of the Ottoman Empire, led to coffee's eventual arrival (through smuggling) in the West. By 1650, the first English coffeehouse opened in Oxford, and cafeacute;s soon became central to urban social life.

In the United States, coffeehouses became a place for political discussion and strategy. It was in this venue that citizens planned the Boston Tea Party in 1773, after which coffee emerged as the American national drink, dramatically changing the dynamics of the coffee trade between the United States and the key producing countries.

Touching on such explosive themes as colonialism, the exploitation of migrant workers, and the devastating impact coffee production has had on the environment, The Coffee Book covers a lot of ground(s) in 183 pages. But if The Coffee Book whets your appetite, Uncommon Grounds is sure to sate it. Pendergrast — whose previous book, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, laid bare the saga of another globally popular beverage — is a fearless journalist, and this probing history may turn your stomach as you sip your cappuccino. With painstaking research and an undeniably engaging voice, Pendergrast explains how the coffee industry came to dominate and mold the economy, politics, and social structures of Central and South America.

The history of coffee is extremely controversial, as Pendergrast details the way in which European imperialists set up coffee plantations in places like Java, Brazil, and Haiti, enslaving the people there. Even today, conditions for coffee workers are as atrocious as ever, as laborers are forced to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and live in squalor as industry executives rake in millions at their expense. Politically, coffee is responsible for the continued subjugation of the Mayan Indians in Guatemala. It provided virtually all foreign exchange for Idi Amin during his genocidal reign in Uganda. And the Sandinistas launched their revolution in Nicaragua by commandeering dictator Anastasio Somoza's coffee plantation. Ecologically, coffee has spurred deforestation and water pollution.

And while coffee is a labor-intensive process that fails to adequately compensate the very people who bring us our national drink, Americans cannot wake up without it. Pendergrast predicts that by the turn of the century, "world coffee production and consumption should exceed 100 million bags a year." Only one thing is certain about coffee, asserts Pendergrast: "Wherever it is grown, sold, brewed, and consumed, there will be lively controversy, strong opinions, and good conversation."

—Kera Bolonik

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Coffee has been banned as a creator of revolutionary sedition, vilified as the worst health-destroyer on earth and praised as the boon of mankind. Its history provides a window through which to view broader themes of colonialism and culture clash, the rise of mass production, modern-day media and marketing, women's issues and international commodity schemes. It also illustrates how an entire industry can lose focus, allowing upstart micro-roasters to reclaim quality and profits. Mark Pendergrast enlivens his scrupulously researched history with anecdotes, eccentric characters and period commentary that will give readers stories to share - over good cups of coffee - for years to come.

FROM THE CRITICS

Wall Street Journal

"A focused and juicy history of our last legal and socially acceptable drug."

New York Times Book Review

"Pendergrast has served up a rich blend of anecdote, character study, market analysis, and social history...everything you ought to know about coffee is here."

Betty Fussell - NY Times

With wit and humor, Pendergrast has served up a rich blend of anecdote, character study, market analysis and social history....[E]verything you ought to know about coffee is here: even how to make it.

Economist

Mr Pendergrast provides a stolid analysis of [Starbucks'] rise to prominence, and waxes eloquent about coffee being ￯﾿ﾽthe millennial elixir in the Age of Starbucks"....Who knows? By restoring some of the magic that propelled coffee to greatness in the first place, Starbucks may well help launch the next great revolution.

Publishers Weekly