A Renaissance Turkish woman could divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with her daily quota of coffee. He credits coffee with the end of slavery in Brazil, the start of revolutions in Guatemala, and even hints that the French Revolution was spawned by the culture of coffee. While underscoring the heady brew's role in geopolitics and environmental devastation, the book's strength lies in Pendergrast's chronicle of quirky factoids and wanton capitalism as exemplified by the lust for the ambrosia of our times. In his new book, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, Mark Pendergrast does his best to educate the drinker and provide some moral alternatives to conspicuous consumption. And yet few coffee consumers know the path-geographical, political, even karmic-that their beloved bean has taken.

Now our collective fashions and addictions have made the bean ubiquitous and coffee snobbery de rigeur. Once the exclusive treat of nobility and religious men, coffee would go on to fuel the common man through the industrial age and into the information age. SINCE THE FIRST BEANS WERE serendipitously discovered by the legendary goatherd Kaldi, in Ethiopia, coffee has been the muse and stimulus of imams, artists, writers, and radicals. UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World By Mark Pendergrast Basic Books, $27.50

APA style: UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.

UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.' Retrieved from MLA style: 'UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.' The Free Library.

Uncommon grounds coffee book