Coffeeland: One man's dark empire and the making of our favorite drug by Augustine Sedgewick

From Follett

"Sedgewick reveals how the growth of coffee production, trade, and consumption went hand in hand with the rise of the scientific idea of energy as a universal force, which transformed thinking about how the human body works as well as ideas about the relationship of one person's work to another's. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname 'Coffeeland,' though for radically different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present. This history of how coffee came to be produced by the world's poorest people and consumed by its richest opens up a unique perspective on how the modern globalized world works, ultimately provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to far-away people and places through the familiar things that make up our everyday lives"--Publisher.

From the Publisher

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Extremely wide-ranging and well researched . . . In a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx." --Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world

Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world's great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history--a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname "Coffeeland," but for starkly different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present.

Provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism.

Recommended by Mr. McCaffrey, Campus Ministry

"If you're a coffee-lover, this book tells an exciting story about the political and scientific drama that arose around coffee as it increased in popularity in the 1800s and 1900s. It also provides a new perspective to relationships between the U.S. and Latin America today, based on economic and political relationships built around the coffee trade."

"The book is not long, but it is geared towards students comfortable reading at an upper high school to college reading level."