Rating: 
Summary: Good to the last page
Review: Mark Pendergrast has done an excellent job chronicling the history of coffee and its impact on the world. From the discovery of the bean to its use as a medicine and then for social gatherings. Pendergrast goes into detail of how coffee is grown and why there has been a rise in Starbucks and coffee houses like it.
Rating: 
Summary: Excelent
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: If you have to find the ONE book that covers Coffee..
Review: Pendergrast has it covered here in Uncommon Grounds.. From Kaldi to Peet's and Starbucks.. He manages to give you the complete historical perspective of coffee from when it was first grown in Africa and South America.. He goes into great length about the trade aspects of coffee, how it's become such an important staple of American life. I personally enjoyed the chapters on the history of American coffee advertising which went WAY beyond the "good to the last drop" story I'd heard regarding Theodor Roosevelt (said after drinking a cup of Maxwell House). If you or anyone you know, is a coffee lover, this is certainly a must-have book. I don't consider myself a coffee junky,(though I do like good coffee) and this was a really interresting & eye opening read.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting book.
Review: Rarely does a book surprise me the way "Uncommon Grounds" did. Who would have thought that the history of coffee was so interesting or complex? Pendergrast does some through research and digs up endlessly fascinating tidbits. Did you know that coffee is originally from Ethiopia? The migration of coffee around the world and the business wars that raged over the sale of coffee to consumers in America is an oft-neglected subject in the annals of history. While the book is a real surprise, my only complaints are that Pendergrast tends to inject his leftist sympathies somewhat too often.
Rating: 
Summary: Why I wrote Uncommon Grounds
Review: So, am I really some kind of caffeine junky? That's one of the first questions I get, since I have written histories of coffee and Coca-Cola. No, though I do love good coffee and I enjoy an ice-cold Coke on a hot summer day. The fact is, however, I only drink one or two cups of coffee a day, in the morning, and I drink more Sprite than Coke. I wrote the books because I am fascinated by how relatively nonessential items can have such an amazing meaning and influence upon our lives and cultures. Coffee is, after all, just the pit of a berry growing on a small tree native to the rainforests of Ethiopia. Coca-Cola is 99% flavored sugar water. Yet coffee is the second most valuable legal traded commodity on earth (after oil, another black energizing liquid), and Coca-Cola is the second best-known word on earth and the world's most widely-distributed branded product. How these things came to be turns out to be fascinating history, with quirky characters, high drama, tragedy, comedy, and inter-disciplinary contributions to anthropology, history, sociology, marketing, and management theory. One of my frustations is that many people assume they must be coffee fiends in order to enjoy Uncommon Grounds, or Cokaholics to read For God, Country and Coca-Cola. That's why I was so pleased when Matthew Budman, a reviewer in a New Jersey newspaper, revealed that he has never drunk a cup of coffee in his life, then wrote: "So the fact that I stayed engrossed throughout Mark Pendergrast's history of coffee is an unmistakable sign: This is a wonderful book. No love of cappuccino or decaf lates is necessary to find Uncommon Grounds a fascinating read." The book is garnering many glowing reviews such as that one. Like most authors, however, I obsess on any negative critique. The NYC Amazon reader (posted here) who said the book "doesn't deliver on its title on how coffee transformed our world" is offering an unfair critique, since the little bean has indeed prompted major environmental, social, and political changes. Read the book and you'll see what I mean. The same reader objects to my "moralizing," when in fact I simply stated the facts and allowed readers to form their own conclusions, until the last chapter, when I figured I had earned the right to state a few measured opinions. Finally, I did answer the question of why France uses so many inferior beans. It's a matter of history and habit. Napoleon's "Continental System" of the early 19th century forced chicory on the French, and they got used to it. Later, French colonies such as the Ivory Coast grew huge amounts of inferior robusta beans, which the French drank. But of course I cannot please everyone. It is gratifying to know that so many people are enjoying the book, often along with some really fine coffee. --Mark Pendergrast
Rating:
Summary: A definitive history & a great read
Review: Sometimes I'm unsure how I've managed it, but I've gotten through more than three decades of life without once having tasted coffee. Mocha, sure, but never the stuff itself. It's particularly surprising considering that my parents down gallons of it and my wife is a genuine snob, ordering pounds of French-roasted beans from a little shop in Berkeley, 2,892 miles away, and filling our kitchen shelves and cupboards with a shiny array of coffee paraphernalia and equipment. So the fact that I stayed fascinated throughout Mark Pendergrast's history of coffee is an unmistakable sign -- this is a wonderful book. Even if you're one of those, like me, who doesn't indulge in steaming cups of cappucino or decaf lattes, you'll find "Uncommon Grounds" an engrossing read. Pendergrast, author of the terrific "For God, Country, and Coca-Cola," delivers an authoritative, entertaining history of man's obsession with the bean. The author's greatest achievement here: capturing an informal tone that accommodates both exposés of slave-labor working conditions on Brazilian plantations and chatty ruminations on the "ever-worsening taste" of instant coffee. It allows Pendergrast to pass on a tremendous amount of information without weighing down the prose. If you're unfamiliar with the story of how coffee became an international favorite, you'll be riveted throughout Pendergrast's chronicle, from coffee's appearance in the Middle East in the 15th century, to its wildfire spread through Europe in the 17th century, to its taking over the Brazilian economy in the 19th century. In each European country, coffee went through the same stages: The aristocracy adopted it, the poor were allowed a taste of it, some politician banned it, another one removed the ban, scientists denounced it, others championed it, eventually everyone accepted it. Poor laborers used coffee to keep them going: "European lacemakers in the early nineteenth century lived almost exclusively on coffee and bread. Because coffee was stimulating and warm, it provided an illusion of nutrition." The craze hit Britain briefly, but "the British had never learned to make coffee properly, and the milk they added to it was foul." (And thus were born the seeds of America's love affair with the black brew: Since the Brits drank tea -- remember the Boston Tea Party? -- colonists drank coffee to spite their oppressors.) Much of "Uncommon Grounds" deals with the business of coffee -- mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, strikes, lawsuits. Pendergrast manages to make international trade disputes interesting (though many readers will find more than they wanted to know about business), and he never gets so lost in the machinations that he neglects either coffee drinkers or the field workers whose lives are caught up in the beverage. He shows how the bean has affected the destiny of each nation that has tasted it; Brazil, for instance, came to coffee late and adopted it almost to the exclusion of every other crop, necessitating the importation of hundreds of thousands of slaves to help with cultivation. The one-product economy was hostage to wild price swings and led to the destruction of huge expanses of rainforest and arable land. "Coffee made modern Brazil, but at an enormous human and environmental cost," Pendergrast writes. Even today, he notes, some Latin American economies remain so dependent on coffee production that quality beans are virtually unavailable to consumers within the countries. In Costa Rica, he writes, "I can testify that the regular brew is horrific." There's a lot here about brand wars and innovative new products, including the story of cereal-based Postum, "America's favorite coffee substitute," and eccentric inventor C.W. Post, who launched the modern advertising age with mountains of grammatically and scientifically faulty anti-coffee ads. We see the evolution of brewing products -- the percolator, Mr. Coffee, Melitta filters -- though only in recent years have decent methods become de rigeur among households and coffee shops. Throughout the book, Pendergrast remains appalled by producers' failure to care about the taste of their coffee and, worse, consumers' failure to notice, even when -- as in during the long post-WWII price war -- manufacturers began using low-quality robusta beans and "instant coffee manufacturers managed to make their product even worse." He describes the now-legendary 1960 Maxwell House percolator ad as "a brilliant, evocative commercial, even though it celebrated a dreadful way to brew coffee." When distributors found ways to package coffee in ways less destructive to taste, "the American consumer continued to ruin the brew by boiling it." And then, in the 1960s, arrived a crucial innovation: high-quality, fresh-roasted coffee, courtesy of frustrated entrepreneurs like Peet's in Berkeley and Zabar's in New York. In 1971, the first Starbucks opened, and the rest of the story of coffee would rotate around the parasitic Seattle chain, which introduced the world to top-of-the-line coffee on every corner and invented a new, Italian-ish vocabulary for coffee drinks (doppia macchiato: a double espresso with a splash of milk). "It's amazing to me that these terms have become part of the language," a former Starbucks executive tells Pendergrast. "A few of us sat in a conference room and just made them up." For many, the most valuable pages will be those titled "Appendix: How to Brew the Perfect Cup," a charmingly personal addendum ("When I began writing this book, I thought I appreciated good coffee.") that puts coffee in perspective -- so *this* is the reason for all the trouble!
Rating: 
Summary: Like Instant Coffee - Dry and Flavorless
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Like Instant Coffee - Dry and Flavorless
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Doesn't live up to title
Review: This book doesn't deliver on its title on how coffee transformed our world. Instead it dwells excessively on market and price manipulation detail while skimming over the social-cultural aspects promised in the title. Yet it does have interesting photographs, and makes clear the extreme oppression of coffee workers in contrast to the U.S. insistence that paying a few cents more for coffee is impossible and justifies military support for brutal regimes. There are frustrating small questions that I would expect a book with this title would do more than mention, e.g., why does France, with its extreme emphasis on the importance of high quality food and taste, traditionally use a high percentage of the most inferior coffee beans to make lousy coffee? I also find the author's moralizing rather off-putting (although I don't disagree with his positions), and his inclusion in the body of the text of the 800 number for just one specific coffee company seems inappropriate. The author doesn't seem to have been able to really focus on what he wanted the book to be.
Rating:
Summary: Decent book
Review: 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.
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