Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and how It Transformed Our World
Author: Mark Pendergrast
Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in Abyssinia to its role in intrigue in the American colonies to its rise as a national consumer product in the twentieth century and its rediscovery with the advent of Starbucks at the end of the century. A panoramic epic, Uncommon Grounds uses coffee production, trade, and consumption as a window through which to view broad historical themes: the clash and blending of cultures, the rise of marketing and the “national brand,” assembly line mass production, and urbanization. Coffeehouses have provided places to plan revolutions, write poetry, do business, and meet friends. The coffee industry has dominated and molded the economy, politics, and social structure of entire countries.Mark Pendergrast introduces the reader to an eccentric cast of characters, all of them with a passion for the golden bean. Uncommon Grounds is nothing less than a coffee-flavored history of the world.
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."
NY Times - Betty Fussell
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 "the 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
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 discovery--the most appealing of which, Pendergast writes, concerns an Ethiopian goatherd who wonders why his goats are dancing on their hind legs and butting one another--to 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 phenomenon--the 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. Post--who raged against the evils of coffee and developed Postum as a substitute for regular brew--provide 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. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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.--Richard S. Drezen, Washington Post News Research Ctr., Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
From its beginnings in Ethiopia to the expansion of the Starbucks empire, the author explores the growth and nature of the coffee business. Mainly concerned with the marketing of coffee in the United States, he does touch upon coffee in Europe and social justice and health issues. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The Economist
Mr Pendergrast provides a stolid analysis of [Starbucks'] rise to prominence, and waxes eloquent about coffee being "the 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.
Brill's Content - Jane Manners
Mark Pendergast's Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World often reads as if it was written under the influence of caffeine: The wide-ranging, animated account charges through coffee's history, from its legendary discovery in an Ethiopian mountain forest sometime before the tenth century to the proliferation of gourmet brands and coffeehouses in the 1990s...
Pendergast concludes his sweeping history on an up note. After largely dismissing reports of coffee's bad health effects, he offers what most readers have probably been craving all along: instructions on how to brew the perfect pot.
The Washington Monthly - Heather Bourbeau
is not only a good read but a vital one for anyone who considers him or herself an American political economist. Or simply a responsible coffee drinker.
The Wall Street Journal - Zakaria
[A] focused and juicy history of our last legal and socially acceptable drug....Balzac ate coffee powder to help 'ideas march into motion like battalions of a grand army.' Perhaps Mr. Pendergrast had a few spoonful while writing this stirring book.
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 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 reactedagainst bland, mass-produced coffee, it's now identified with a corporate giant called Starbucks, whose aggressive tactics Pendergrast skillfullyÊdescribes. 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)
Books about: No More Mondays or Fashion Design
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade
Author: Pietra Rivoli
Praise for THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
"Engrossing . . . (Rivoli) goes wherever the T-shirt goes, and there are surprises around every corner . . . full of memorable characters and vivid scenes."
—Time
"An engaging and illuminating saga. . . . Rivoli follows her T-shirt along its route, but that is like saying that Melville follows his whale. . . . Her nuanced and fair-minded approach is all the more powerful for eschewing the pretense of ideological absolutism, and her telescopic look through a single industry has all the makings of an economics classic."
—The New York Times
"Rarely is a business book so well written that one would gladly stay up all night to finish it. Pietra Rivoli's The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is just such a page-turner."
—CIO magazine
"Succeeds admirably . . . T-shirts may not have changed the world, but their story is a useful account of how free trade and protectionism certainly have."
—Financial Times
"[A] fascinating exploration of the history, economics, and politics of world trade . . . The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is a thought-provoking yarn that exhibits the ugly, the bad, and the good of globalization, and points to the unintended positive consequences of the clash between proponents and opponents of free trade."
—Star-Telegram (Fort Worth)
"Part travelogue, part history, and part economics, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is ALL storytelling, and in the grand style. A must-read."
—PeterJ. Dougherty, Senior Economics Editor, Princeton University Press author of Who's Afraid of Adam Smith?
"A readable and evenhanded treatment of the complexities of free trade . . . As Rivoli repeatedly makes clear, there is absolutely nothing free about free trade except the slogan."
—San Francisco Chronicle
Foreign Affairs
The protagonist of this highly informative and entertaining book is a $6 T-shirt purchased in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Georgetown economist Rivoli uses her T-shirt as a vehicle for telling an analytic story about its life — from the cotton fields of Texas to either its proud purchase by a Tanzanian villager or its sale as mattress filler, depending on its condition when discarded by its American owner. Along the way, she explores the history of cotton production and the cotton textile industry and evaluates the misguided and often absurd U.S. textile policy over the past half century, up to the end of 2004, when the multilateral Multifiber Arrangement (which inadvertently created many more jobs in not-quite-competitive developing countries than it preserved in the United States) expired. Rivoli draws heavily on her own interviews and on anthropological as well as economic literature, which gives her tale a human touch. She shows how despite the awful working conditions in apparel factories, in both historical America and contemporary poor countries the jobs they offered were often liberating to young women, who preferred the sweatshops to the stifling life they otherwise would have had to endure on the farm.
Table of Contents:
Preface.
Prologue.
PART I: KING COTTON.
1. Reinsch Cotton Farm, Smyer, Texas.
2. The History of American Cotton.
3. Back at the Reinsch Farm.
PART II: MADE IN CHINA.
4. Cotton Comes to China.
5. The Long Race to the Bottom.
6. Sisters in Time.
PART III: TROUBLE AT THE BORDER.
7. Dogs Snarling Together.
8. Perverse Effects and Unintended Consequences of T-Shirt Trade Policy.
9. 40 Years of “Temporary” Protectionism Ends in 2005—and China Takes All the Jobs.
PART IV: MY T-SHIRT FINALLY ENCOUNTERS A FREE MARKET.
10. Where T-Shirts Go after the Salvation Army Bin.
11. How Small Entrepreneurs Clothe East Africa with Old American T-Shirts.
Conclusion.
Epilogue to the Paperback Edition.
Acknowledgments.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.
