UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.

• Author: Bourbeau, Heather
• Position: Review

UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World By Mark Pendergrast Basic Books, $27.50

SINCE THE FIRST BEANS WERE serendipitously discovered by the legendary goatherd Kaldi, in Ethiopia, coffee has been the muse and stimulus of imams, artists, writers, and radicals. Once the exclusive treat of nobility and religious men, coffee would go on to fuel the common man through the industrial age and into the information age. Now our collective fashions and addictions have made the bean ubiquitous and coffee snobbery de rigeur. And yet few coffee consumers know the path--geographical, political, even karmic--that their beloved bean has taken.

In his new book, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, Mark Pendergrast does his best to educate the drinker and provide some moral alternatives to conspicuous consumption. While underscoring the heady brew's role in geopolitics and environmental devastation, the book's strength lies in Pendergrast's chronicle of quirky factoids and wanton capitalism as exemplified by the lust for the ambrosia of our times.

He credits coffee with the end of slavery in Brazil, the start of revolutions in Guatemala, and even hints that the French Revolution was spawned by the culture of coffee. A Renaissance Turkish woman could divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with her daily quota of coffee. Instead of banning the dreaded "Muslim drink," Pope Clement VIII baptized coffee, making it a "truly Christian beverage" A century later, Turkish troops fleeing Vienna would leave behind sacks of coffee, which were discovered by an innovative Franz George Kolschitzky, who launched the Viennese cafe tradition.

For all his painstaking research, Pendergrast's skill as a non-academic historian shines best when he reaches the modern New World through his often-witty descriptions of an industry dominated by imperialistic traditions, sexism, and blinded, arrogant leaders. Among the more engrossing tales is Pendergrast's portrait of the fanatic creator of the successful coffee-alternative Postum and Grape-Nuts cereal, C.W. Post, and of the coffee men he left in his zealous anti-coffee wake. On the news that his archenemy, Post, had suffered a nervous breakdown after years of denouncing "coffee-slugged nerves," Tea & Coffee Trade Journal editor William Ukers wrote with sardonic glee, "We would not appear to gloat over his misfortune." Reveling, he continued, "Indeed, if his...