Books I've Read: The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

I'll admit that I picked up this paperback because on the cover it says that  Anthony Bourdain thought it was "Absolutely riveting."  I do love Bourdain.

This is a light read, part history of coffee and part hilarious travelogue - I liked the travelogue parts better than the history parts, but on the whole it is entertaining.  I think it feel quite short of proving its thesis that coffee enlightened humanity, but it is still a fun book for a coffee-lover such as myself.

Here are some memorable quotes:

"Drugs directly alter human behavior, productivity, and even reason.  I'm not saying that medieval man was stupider than his modern cousin.  He was merely decaffeinated and much like you or me before our first cup: grouchy and muddleheaded." (p. 133)


"Coffee and humanity both sprang from the same area in eastern Africa.  What if some of those early ape-men nibbled on the bright red berries?  What if the resulting mental stimulation opened them up to a new way of looking at old problems, much as it did Europeans?  Could this group of berry nibblers be the Missing Link, and that memory of the bright but bitter-tasting fruit be the archetype for the story of the Garden of Eden?" (p. 133-134)


"We [Americans] became a nation of java junkies, wired from dawn to dusk intent on running faster, getting richer, dancing harder, playing longer and getting higher than anybody else."  (p. 199)

Recommended, but don't take it too seriously.