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Reviews
Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick
anianneooh's review against another edition
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Factual and woven into a beautiful and digestivable story.
aecinf's review
4.0
Reading about caffeine as a November reading challenge. I enjoyed this book, a historical overview of the coffee plantation industry using the focal point of James Hill's San Salvador plantations for a primary setting. It struck me as I was reading that I really have no concept of where most of my food comes from. The author covers the history well enough but also dramatizes the story in a way that brings to life the culture, blood, starvation, and angst of those involved with the plantations. A very, very brief discussion of fair trade at the end of the book left me wanting a bit more on that topic but I understand that this was not the book's primary purpose.
mogreig's review against another edition
3.0
A comprehensive look into coffee in Central America and how it changed the politics of the region and the lives of the indigenous people. Worth reading to understand the power of the coffee barons.
bduricy's review
adventurous
challenging
informative
slow-paced
3.25
an addition to the corpus of books on the global political economy of coffee, with all of the tying-together-things-you-have-never-heard-of-and-things-you-might-have that such a work entails. on that level, the book is a success. each new chapter, however, began with a continued hope that the book would become an engaging work of a more localized political economy suggested by the book's framing (in both prose and marketing)
saraanneb3's review
2.0
This book finally gets interesting at the end when he starts analyzing the supply chain and growth of supermarkets. That really should have been his book, not the lackluster and thin “history” and analysis of coffee. By the time I got to that part I was so bored, I just wanted to be done.
sophiewoz's review against another edition
5.0
in the final chapter of this book, sedgewick references sidney mintz’s sweetness and power quite a bit in a way i found extremely fulfilling, as the whole time i read this book i could feel it act as such a timely successor to a book that ive felt to be very influential in my understanding of globalization and commodity histories. this was incredibly well written and each thread masterfully woven to create a powerful story. really really enjoyed this