The devil's cup

A self-appointed social anthropologist of coffee, Stewart Lee Allen has written the definitive account of caffeine's impact on humankind. Beginning in Ethiopia where he sails a dhow along the same route that carried the first beans to Yemen 1500 years ago, Allen literally travels the world on his mission to prove his theory that coffee is the driving force in history. Refreshingly lateral, superbly researched and in itself an extraordinary journey, The Devil's Cup does for lassitude what Dava Sobel did for longitude. - Jacket.