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Rating: 
Summary: Well-researched but somehow boring
Review: This book is really well-researched. All you ever wanted to know about caffeine is in this book. The problem is that the authors stuff the book with so many facts and quotes from other books/treatises that they make it unreadable. This is especially true for the historical part (first part of the book). If you want to know about the history of caffeine, I would not buy this book. The book also has a lot of very interesting statistics and facts, and just for that reason, I will keep it.
Rating: 
Summary: Well-researched and entertaining.
Review: This is great reading! Caffeine is so ubiquitous within society that most of us have never really thought about how or why we use it. In this very comprehensive book, the authors detail the history of coffee, tea, and chocolate. This includes their discovery, cultivation, introduction into various societies around the world, impact on society, opposition efforts and medical implications. The book is written in a very evenhanded tone without a noticeably pro-caffeine or anti-caffeine agenda. It is full of absolutely fascinating historical tidbits. Who knew that coffee replaced beer as the morning beverage in the United States, or that the U.S. Government once brought suit against Coca Cola arguing that the caffeine in the soft drink caused bad behavior in adolescent boys? This book may not motivate you to forgo that morning cup of coffee, but you certainly will stare at it with a bit more insight.
Rating:
Summary: Who knew?
Review: Who knew that caffeine had such a fascinating story?I received a copy of the book as a Christmas present from a family member who knows of my love of the cappuccino, and I must say I was suprised by what Weinberg and Bealer have discovered about the drug. The scientific and medical material is interesting and useful (to pretty much everybody, as apparently most of the world ingests caffeine daily in one form or another), but it was the cultural and social history that I found really engaging. A tiny example: Did you know that Bach wrote a "Coffee Cantata"? Neither did I, and I'm not sure I'll ever have a use for this snippet, but it's good just to know it. Anyway, I really enjoyed the book and can't imagine a better researched or more interesting treatment of "the world's most popular drug."
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