Competition among coffee roasters, he shows, spurred innovations in advertising, shipping, and technology, from brand-name recognition to vacuum-packed bags, which then found applications in other industries. The author is especially detailed in mapping coffee’s role in the United States. Wired Frenchmen started getting revolutionary ideas contented beer drinkers, Pendergrast suggests, would never have stormed the Bastille. By the 16th century, the bean had conquered Turkey, where "a lack of sufficient coffee provided grounds for a woman to seek divorce." In the succeeding two centuries, coffee replaced beer as the drink of choice in Europe. Folklore has it that an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi discovered coffee sometime before the sixth century a.d., when his animals "danced" after nibbling the red berries. Pendergrast, author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola (1994), recounts the story from the berry to the last drop. They muster a surprisingly compelling case for their overcaffeinated thesis. With only a little facetiousness, the authors assert that coffee brought about the French Revolution, the poverty of Latin America, and most everything in between. Murad IV banned it for fear that it made subjects disloyal, while King Charles II complained that British coffeehouses were breeding "false, malicious, and scandalous reports." Two books-an encyclopedic volume by Pendergrast and a playful romp by Allen-suggest that Murad and Charles were right about coffee’s potency.
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