Uncommon Grounds: The History Of Coffee And How It Transformed Our World

The subtitle of this book is: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World. I thought I was getting into a book about the role of coffee in the waves and trends of world history.
However, Prendergast almost entirely ignores the rest of the world (while repeatedly remarking how Europeans drink more coffee than Americans) and writes, instead a literature review of coffee industry publications, going into tedious detail of the advertising wars between coffee companies in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Occasionally, the author finds himself remarking about how coffee consumption in the industrialized world helped institutionalize atrocious poverty in coffee-growing countries, but then eschews considered analysis in order to get back to the oh-so-enthralling decades-long battle between Maxwell House and Hills Brothers for market share.
Prendergast repeatedly refers to how Americans' taste for coffee is, objectively, poor - one feels he does this as compensation for what he knows is a weak narrative.
If you are looking for a book which considers the 'world' as 95% America and chapters full of quotes from fin de siecle coffee advertisements, you've found the right one. If you are looking for a careful anaylsis of how coffee has changed the world, you'll need to keep looking.

Everything we do, everything we buy has an impact far around the world. This is an excellent study of these links through an in depth review of the coffee industry. Pendergrast has researched the significant political, business, and economic history of the industry and its role in the US relationship with Latin American, African and Asian coffee producing countries. The information is academic quality but throughoughly readible.

Pendergrast certainly would not ask us to give up this amazing drink, but the book does help to lift the veil of ignorance surrounding the impact our decision has and our role and responsibility in the economic process called the "invisible hand" of capitalism.

The book is a bit heavy on the marketing history of the industry, but to business people or economists this is a one of its strongest aspects. It is also important to understand the history of coffee consumption in the US (and has implications for other products we buy.) Quite simply, Americans bought crappy coffee just because of the advertising and brand strategy. It is amazing to me how much longer it took Americans to realize the potential for much better tasting coffee. It does give hope to all entrepreneurs, because this seems so obvious to us post-Starbucks, but it is only very recently that gourmet coffee companies figured out that we might want something with flavor.

If there are broader lessons from this book, it is to re-examine what we buy. What do we buy that is just good marketing and yet is an inferior product in some way. I like to believe that most Americans would not want to buy products that are made with slave or child labor or with environmental practices that are killing people in another country. Obviously the real world is not so black and white, but I think the same principle applies to everything we buy. Ideally, we will continue to evolve as a society and consider these factors when we choose our coffee. It is the beauty and potential of our economic system that we CAN push Starbucks and other companies in that direction just buy what we choose at the coffee cart or in the grocery aisle.

The 4 star rating is the average between the 2 editions. The 1st rates a 5*, the
2nd only a 3. I have left the review on the 1st edition & have added comments @ the
bottom of the review.

1st EDITION

This is an excellent history, but needs a 2nd edition. A lot has happened in the
last 10 years. For instance in 2009, coffee made news as Starbucks had to close some
of its shops because of the recession. Also it's now easier to find organic & Fair
Trade coffee. Vietnam is now one of the top producers of Robusta beans. I wish he
would have dealt a little more with coffee ads which were a major part of coffee's
history during the 20th century. I didn't start drinking coffee until recently, but
I never forgot the Maxwell House percolator tune, Mrs. Olsen, Juan Valdez, or the
"IF I DON'T GET AMERICAN ACE COFFEE, I'M GOING BACK TO BED" commercials. Juan
Valdez' influence is still felt today. Go to any grocery store & you will see 100%
COLOMBIAN coffee. By the way, the man in the A.Ace. firing squad commercial in
Mexico was one of Elvis Presley's back up singers. Since I was once addicted to TV,
I remember the commercials very well. Be warned, the book is depressing @ times
(when you read abt the coffee farmers or the civil wars & bloodbaths in the coffee
producing nations), but to anyone who is interested in a detailed discussion of
coffee history, this is the book to read. I hope that the author will update it.

2nd EDITION

I was looking forward to this one, but can only give it mixed reviews. The preface
is OK & the revised chapter FINAL GROUNDS where he updated the history is excellent.
The reason I gave the 2nd ed. only 3 stars is that he chopped out quite a bit of the
material from the 1st ed. to make the book shorter. He even edited out the Kona
scandal. I would have preferred that he had just left the book intact (changing only
what was found to be incorrect), then adding the new prefix & the update-chapter at
the end. As it is the reader that who has only the 2nd ed. loses a lot of material
from the 1st. So if one has the 1st ed, don't throw it away. I will leave it to the
reader as to if 2 new chapters are worth the price of the book.

I was excited when I ordered this book: an analysis of a major crop like coffee and how it has deeply influenced civilization is a fascinating premise. Coffee is, after all, pretty useless from a nutritional standpoint and only delivers minor results from a drug standpoint. I was encouraged further by its size. Surely this will be a comprehensive breakdown of all the social, cultural, and political impact our beloved drink has had.
I couldn't have been further from the mark. The book is hardly comprehensive, and where it does touch down on coffee's influence, it's not so much a critical assessment or consideration of things as it is more like a lecture from a bad history teacher: "And then this happened. And then that happened. And then these people bought coffee businesses. And then made money from them."
A good contrast is the superbly written "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. Good analysis of a huge subject like coffee (or in Pollan's case, the American food system) weaves implications together, from the individual to the larger society and to civilization itself. It also helps if the author has a flair for engaging, "page-turning" narrative. Pollan expertly blends his personal experiences into a discussion of American food that would be a bit dry and boring otherwise. Pendergrast fails at immersing the reader into his subject, partly because unlike Pollan, he rarely ever sinks his teeth into the human drama of any one episode in his book. I'll bet Jabez Burns the inventor was a fascinating character. I'll bet the Mayan revolts against government-mandated coffee plantations has plenty to teach us. But from one episode to the next, the reader is given small glimpses of events and people, just scratches of the surface. One fleshed out narrative of one of those awful episodes in South American coffee history could have been excellent: a solid fifty or so pages devoted to an exemplar of what is was like. Instead we get a hundred or so three-sentence summaries stretched out over the same distance. The impact is minimal.
I expected a noble and intriguing beast of a book; Pendergrast served me a hamster spinning its wheel.

I first heard about this book in a review on the Arts&Letters Daily website and couldn't agree more that this is a fabulous book. Mark Pendergast presents everything you never knew about coffee but didn't know existed, in an interesting, well woven story, from its history to present day business aspects to a consumers primer about this most stimulating of drinks. Others have reviewed this book as "liberal", but it simply presents the reality of this commodity. This book will educate and broaden you in many ways among which, the desire to find your favorite coffee, I've consequently graduated from staled in the can coffee to 8 o'clock-whole bean. The only drawback is for those who are not as business oriented the numbers by 3/4 of the way into the book can get a little tiring, but not too bad. Thank you Mark for writing this book!

This book is about coffee. Obvious, right?
Yet, it is also about the larger world out there. Our kind author isn't just using coffee as a metaphor, but instead uses Coffee as the proverbial "tip of the iceberg" as a way to talk about larger historical, political and social issues in a way that is palatable to the average reader. Coffee has had a major impact on the United States, from our very beginnings in the Boston Tea Party to our present day position in the land of 24-hour a day television, which of course really means 24 hours a day of advertising.
How has this affected our place in the world? Americans drink a lot of coffee to get a quick pick me up. And that mood enhancing aspect is also included in similar products... those similar products include Cola, Tea, and all sorts of tricked out street drugs designed to make us feel better about who or what we are. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing really isn't important to the discussion at this level, just that we are aware of it.
Coffee has also affected our political dealing with the rest of the world, be it our weird love-hate relationship with South and Central America as a source of coffee, and more currently various illegal drugs. If we weren't buying it they wouldn't be selling it to us. It has also entered into all kinds of health topics and considerations.
Coffee has had a major social and political impact on the Untied States. We use it, and similar products and drugs for various reasons. We threaten political and military consequenences to those who have provided us those things. The "pick me up" aspect makes possible a longer workday for workers in modern society... and this can have productivity increases for companies and people. The advertising methods, those in many ways were invented to "push" coffee are everywhere in our social framework.
And we haven't gotten to coffee's health affects. Is coffee good for you? A simple question that doctors is still trying to properly answer. It has some kind of health impact on our people, but what and how and why are still, in many ways, to be answered.
There is a lot to be said, and my rambling review gives an idea of the many topics this most excellent book covers.
But most importantly, the author tells one how to brew a good cup of coffee.

Ok, I admitt that if you do know about coffee you'll probably find it somewhat incomplete, specially in the terms of how to get a great cup of it. However, what makes this book great is the fact that it clearly states the way coffee had an influence in the world and how coffee was influenced by different historical events. This book is not about coffee, but as the title states, it is about the influence of masses and advertizing over a product, as well as the influence of a product in the shaping of society.
This book won't specify a lot about the plant or the drink in itself, but rather as it was brought to it's consumers and how separated is the origin from the end user of an agricultural product. It will help you understand more about economics than about coffee, yet it is not a bad book. If you like to know how different products or scientifical theories influenced the world and helped shape society, then this is a must read. If you want to know a lot about coffee and all of it's subtleties, then, this is not your book.

This is a great book that details the origins of coffee from 6th century Ethiopia to today's Starbucks. On many levels this book succeeds. It has a lot of coffee trivia that is both amusing and thoughtprovoking, it shows how coffee gained its relevance in today's society, and lastly it puts the social and political aspects of coffee under a microscope.
For 11 years I have been a futures and commodities investor, broker, and author. One of my favorite futures commodities is coffee. This book has added to my knowledge base by 10 times. I feel I have a deeper understanding and appreciation of java and in the long run I suspect that this will improve my investments in coffee futures. My hat is off to the author. Congrats on a fine book.

A staple of our breakfast table, our breaks at work, after dinner, and for a pick me up all during the day coffee is something that we think about the cup in front of us, but rarely do we think of how we got here. Pendergast delves into this mix, taking us back to the coffee cradle of Ethopia and on up to the Starbucks wars of the present day. He has crafted a very readable and accessible story of the history of coffee, as an economic and social driving force. The reader is given a real overview of how this dark, sometimes bitter brew has woven itself into the fabric of our lives, from the match heated cups in the trenches of the World Wars to the lines forming outside your neighborhood coffee house today.
But Pendergast looks at both sides of the story - the consumers and the coffee companies, but also the suppliers and the lives of those who make their (meager) livelihood off of harvesting the coffee bean. He nicely contrasts the Americans up in arms because of coffee rising past $1 a pound, while that $1 is more than a day's wage for many of the coffee harvesters. Coffee does not just appear on the grocery shelf, or in our cup by magic, it takes many steps on teh way, and these have impact upon costs, and upon the lives of those doing the work.
While personally I think that the book slows down heavily in the final chapters, overall I found it kept me engaged, with broad topics broken down in short subjects helping to keep the focus and the players straight. Coffee has been the boon and the bane of society for the past few hundred years. I found that I also came away with a greater understanding of the types of coffee, and what to be looking for when I'm buying it to get a better quality. Arabica, Robusta, and others now mean something more to me, and that's the beauty of a book like this - the information you receive appears on so many levels. I tip my cup to Mr. Pendergast.

This book outlines the history of coffee with a focus on the industry as a whole. It's main focus is on the late 19th century to the present. I think it provides an excellent overview and history of the business. I found it very readable and quite interesting. It is not dry like you would expect a business history book to be. Pendergrast does a good job of sprinkling in tidbits of facts throughout the book without bogging down. He also illuminates some of the drama behind the early days of small roasters in America growing and consolidating. This book is not for people who want to learn how to make coffee (it does have a few pages in an appendix on this). It is purely about the history of the business with a focus on events during the 20th century. I disagree with some comments made about this book. This book does reveal how coffee has transformed several Latin American and African countries even to this day. It does not spend entire chapters on specific countries but rather surveys several countries and the impact the industry has had. I thought Pendegrast did a fairly good job at balancing the different perspectives of retailers, roasters, importers, and growers. He also sheds some light onto the origins of specialty coffee and the explosion of retailers such as Starbucks. Some have argued this book is leftist, others argue it does not adequately cover the exploitation of Latin America and Africa by the industry. I think the author does a fairly good job of portraying both views, perhaps with a bit of leaning left. Pendergrast reveals fascinating personalities such as C.W. Post the inventor of Postum and many other health cereals still produced today or Howard Schultz - without whom Starbucks would never have been the phenomenon it is, but rather a regional roaster and retailer at best.
I do agree with one reader's review - this is not a coffee table book. It is a history book - a history of the commodity we know as the coffee bean. Since it is such a book - expect it to read like a history book, a good, readable history book. It is not riveting, rather it is interesting.