Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee Book

EDIT: When the sweet Poison of the treacherous Grape
Had acted on the world a general rape;...
Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome liquor
That heals the stomach and makes the genius quicker.
~ ANONYMOUS PURITAN, 1674I have read this book this weekend for the third time. I never mentioned in my initial review that this is one of the most interesting travel journals I have read.

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It was a review: 'The Cream of the crop' - by Neil Pendock - Sunday Time Lifestyle, December 2, 2001, that got me hunting for this book.

This book is actually a serious, but also a satirical view on important world history and the role coffee played in so-called intellectual development. If you constantly torture yourself with serious world history, often inspired by bad politics, wouldn't you like to read history from a totally different angle from to time?

I do not want to write much more than Neil Pendock about the book.I have kept this review for so many years. It was like a maddening obsession to find this book some or other time, and when it happened I did do a pirouette on the moon and made a gymnastic roll right over it. Eccentric, I know!

Neil Pendock: It was the coffee bean that civilized modern man, whatever alcohol you may add to it.

The soil of Africa produced both mankind and coffee. It was in the Kenyan Rift Valley and the Sterkfontein caves (South Africa) where homo sapiens exchanged trees for caves, developed the coffee drinking culture and became street smart because of that!

According to Alan, civilization was kept alive by the coffee-drinking Muslims of Arabia, while Western Europe held the mother of all parties during the Middle Ages. It was the coffee-drinkers who preserved the knowledge of Aristotle, even adding to it with inventions of their own, like algebra.

Your average northern European - man, woman and child - drank three liters of beer a day, and that of a far higher alcoholic content than the thin gassy bevvies of today. One in every seven buildings in England was a tavern. In addition to this, the population was mostly stoned from the hallucinogenic fungus called ergot which contaminated the bread.

One of Martin Luther's main targets in his religious reformation of the 16th century was the excess of alcohol. The first temperance league was established in Luther's native Germany contemporaneously with the hammering of his religious objections onto the door of his local cathedral. Members of the leagues solemnly undertook to limit their consumption of wine during meals to seven glasses.

The rise of Britain as a super power coincided with the advent of a coffee culture. In 1652 there was one coffee house in Britain. Fifty years later there was 2 000! Two of the most important commercial ventures saw the light of day in coffee houses - The insurance brokers Lloyd's of London and the British East India Company - one of the greatest trading companies in the world. Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope swopped witty couplets in Will's Café. The famous painter, Hogarth hung out at Old Slaughter's.

Sartre and Camus nutted out existensialism in the Paris based Café Flore. Picasso doodled at Le Lapin Agile and the surrealists held court at the Rotonde. In fact, things got so bad that the owner of Café Momu complained: "Our waiter was reduced to an idiot in the prime of his life, as a result of the conversations he had to listen to."
At the time it was out of print, so I settled for this The History of the World in 6 Glasses . I thought it might be on par with the Devil's Cup.

My interest in these kind of books stems from my Chappie bubblegum addiction as a kid. If you are a Chappie-wrapper fan like me, you will love this book! The Chappie wrapper contained the question 'DID YOU KNOW' on the inside, and introduced the young upcoming minds to fascinating information. So apart from the chewing gum often sticking in our hair when we accidentally fell asleep, the contained answers on the inside of the Chappie wrapper got us stuck to the wild and the wonderful, often hilarious idiocyncracies, of our world.

It probably inspired me later in life to buy books such as "The Ultimate Loo Book" by Mitchell Symons which contained similar but even more fascinating tidbits of life. And you guess correctly, it is situated in the room it was intended for. There's method in the madness, though! My kids did not have access to Chappies and they did need all sorts of stimulation, right? I thought the above-mentioned books might be valuable additions to the room for great achievements in the house! For the record, the next addition to this throne-room collection will be
"Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach!