Stewart Lee Allen

I had two books about coffee on my 'to-read' book and I picked up this one instead of Uncommon Grounds. Wish I'd gotten the other one.

This book is mostly the self-indulgent ramblings of a poor backpacker who makes questionable decisions at every turn. Illegal border crossings into war-torn countries, helping human smugglers, aiding art forgers, buying fake passports...and that's just in the first half of the book. He repeatedly refers to his 'lover' who leaves him early on in his travels--someone who apparently traveled the world with him and helped him form various decisions but yet he reduces her to nothing more than a sexual object for his convenience. I guess other readers found all of this funny. I did not.

Of course the author talks about coffee, but a lot of it is about how he couldn't find coffee in the middle east where he expected to, and when he did it was terrible. The book isn't organized in any kind of way for readers to understand how coffee evolved. There's a point at which he flashes back to a previous point in his travels but doesn't explain if he is also jumping back in the coffee timeline or not.

Overall, the book just seems like an excuse to fund the author's travel budget.… (more)

Beginning in the Ethiopian city of Harrar, the author travels throughout Africa, into India, Turkey, Austria, France and South America, all to follow the path of the coffee plant and its many variations. He tracks down the descendant of the man who may have created the first coffee plantation, is present for a spiritual coffee ritual in Ethiopia, travels through Yemen and witnesses the widespread addiction to a plant called qat, and attends a rare performance by whirling dervishes in Konya. He also traces the roots of various coffee varieties and the people who were instrumental in making coffee a worldwide beverage.
Allen is an American adventurer, a man who is so besotted with the romance of adventure that he's fearless and pretty much rendered incapable of saying no, whether helping an art forger or in becoming a human smuggler (he dropped out only because the plan was too disorganized). The book was first published in 1999, and the world has changed enough in that short amount of time that his adventures would be so much more difficult, if not impossible, today. His travels are fascinating, both for the history and the people he meets. If you enjoy something like Around the World in 80 Days, you'd probably like this sort-of non-fiction version that is absolutely crammed with places you've never heard of before.… (more)

This is partly a book about coffee, its history, and its effects on the world, and partly a slightly disjointed travelogue in which the author traipses around five different continents visiting coffee-related places and doing various more or less coffee-related things.

I liked one of these two things considerably better than the other. The facts about and musings on coffee and its place in history were interesting, entertainingly written, and generally pretty fun. But the account of the author's travels, which involved a lot of doing stupid and occasionally illegal things, often left me shaking my head a bit and thinking, "Who is this guy, and why am I reading about his dumb adventures, again?"… (more)