Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
(Penguin, $30)
Your morning coffee, like anything else, has never been an innocent pleasure, said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Augustine Sedgewick’s new book turns the history of the ubiquitous beverage into a story that’s “not very different from the kind that might be told of Colombian cocaine production and narco-terrorism.” To the young historian, coffee helped pioneer globalization, establishing a pattern in which the consumer-addict is tied to poor laborer-producers in a manufactured co-dependence. Sedgewick is wrong that capitalism is the culprit here; he should blame mass-scale agriculture. But he’s right that the impoverishment of farmworkers in the southern hemisphere is linked to every citizen in the industrialized north who drinks coffee in order to work hard and fast enough to stay employed. He has also found a “fiendishly brilliant” protagonist.
James Hill arrived in El Salvador in 1889 as an 18-year-old textile salesman. At times, in Coffeeland, “Hill seems like a pantomime villain,” said Kathryn Hughes in TheGuardian.com. But Sedgewick paints him as a man of his time: Born in the slums of Manchester, a great classroom for factory-style production, Hill saw an opportunity in coffee and wound up pursuing worker productivity with the zeal appropriate to a convert. In the fertile land surrounding the Santa Ana volcano, Hill discovered an Eden where indigenous people lived easily off the land, and he
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Hold Still
by Leanne Shapton (2012). You might not think you want to read a story about an artist-illustrator’s past life as a competitive swimmer and her continuing love for swimming, swimming pools, and swimsuits. But you do, you really do. Shapton’s acute sense memory and sharp prose, coupled with her illustrations and photos, are a pleasure from start to finish.
Swimming Studies
by Corita Kent and Jan Steward (1992). Sister Corita Kent was a beloved and revolutionary art teacher in 1960s Los Angeles and a gifted printmaker. She was also a firm believer in learning by doing, and this is an indispensable guide to her teaching philosophy, full of novel ways of paying attention to the world around you.
Learning
by Octavia Butler (1979). I’ve never been a fan of science fiction, but this novel rocked my world. It immerses you in the startling reality of a young writer who finds herself time traveling between 1976 Los Angeles and life among her ancestors on an antebellum Maryland plantation. Utterly transfixing, deeply disturbing, and massterfully drawn.
Kindred
by William B. Irvine (2008). A friend gave me this book, which I never would have read otherwise. It has provided me with an essential framework for wanting what I already have, and for processing my fears about death, loss, and rampant consumerism. It is a road map for living a more tranquil, appreciative life, all modeled on the philosophy of the Stoics.
A Guide to the Good Life
by Patti Smith (2010). Everyone loves Patti Smith’s memoir, for good reason, and the 2018 illustrated edition is even better than the original. The singer and poet is an international treasure, able to communicate deeply even on Instagram, and her account of her young life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is clearly and beautifully told.
Just Kids