Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and how It Transformed Our World Book

I'm giving this book only 2 stars due to poor writing and even worse editing. It seems as if after the first 175 pages the editors (feeling the same as I did) got bored reading the manuscript and just sent it to the printers out of exhaustion. This is most evident when you get to the last 50 pages, when we finally learn the most basic facts about the thing we had been reading about for such a painfully long time: coffee's chemical composition, and the scientific facts about caffeine's affect on the body. A high school newspaper editor would have had sense enough to discuss such things in the beginning of the book.

On the positive side, the book filled in the gaps of what I already knew about how coffee gets into my cup (which wasn't much). It truly was interesting to learn about the Central/South American coffee-producing countries and U.S. involvement in their history - something completely ignored in public school history class.

But, altogether I was disappointed. My initial excitement over this book waned into an unenthusiastic duty to finish in order to get the damn book back to the library in time before I racked up too many fines.