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 industry—advertising 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 Java—too often, good coffee isn’t good for the people who produce it. (60 b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-465-03631-7
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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