PositiveThe AtlanticThe intricate synergies of coffee and capitalism form the subtext of the historian Augustine Sedgewick’s thoroughly engrossing first book ...\'What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?\' Sedgewick asks in his early pages. Coffeeland offers a fascinating meditation on that question, by rendering once-obscure lines of connection starkly visible ... Though his analysis of coffee’s political economy does owe a debt to Marx, his literary gifts and prodigious research make for a deeply satisfying reading experience studded with narrative surprise. Sedgewick has a knack for the sparkling digression and arresting jump cut, hopping back and forth between El Salvador and the wider world, where coffee was being consumed in ever-increasing quantities. He is especially good on the marketing of coffee to Americans ... He shows how coffee has long been promoted in America less as a tasty beverage or pleasurable experience than as a means to an end: \'a form of instant energy—a work drug.\'
Jonathan Kauffman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewJonathan Kauffman’s briskly entertaining history, Hippie Food, makes a convincing case for adding yet another legacy to that list: the way we eat ...his book is the work of an enterprising journalist who has interviewed many in the cast of hippie farmers, cooks, communards and food artisans who together forged what Kauffman asks us to regard as a new and 'unique, self-contained cuisine' ... Kauffman has added a lot to it, in the way of both fresh information and narrative verve. In his telling, hippie food resulted from the convergence, around 1970, of three different strains of food ideology: health food faddism; ethical vegetarianism; and a post-Silent Spring critique of industrialized food and farming ... Capitalism’s genius for absorbing and integrating every challenge to it is on vivid display in this thoroughly absorbing history.
