October 30, 2017
Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier) tells the exciting true story of a Yemeni-American man’s attempts to promote his ancestral country’s heritage, giving both a timely gloss on the traditional American dream and a window into the nightmare of contemporary political instability. The book first finds Mokhtar Alkhanshali as an ambitious but unfocused 25-year-old who has held a series of odd jobs in the Bay Area—including as a car salesman and doorman. He finds unexpected direction in 2013, when he learns that coffee originated 500-years earlier in his family’s native country, under the oversight of the titular Sufi holy man. This revelation sends him on an entrepreneurial quest to revitalize the long-dormant Yemeni coffee industry. Alkhanshali’s education in the coffee business provides a fascinating glimpse at how coffee is grown and processed today, but his path takes a startling turn in 2015 when Alkhanshali visits Yemen to make final importing arrangements just as the country collapses into civil war. The narrative turns into an increasingly surreal account of Alkhanshali’s efforts to elude imprisonment and even death in order to get the coffee-bean samples he has secured back to America. Eggers’s book works as both a heartwarming success story with a winning central character and an account of real-life adventures that read with the vividness of fiction.
Starred review from December 1, 2017
Journalism is integral to Eggers' (Heroes of the Frontier, 2016) many-faceted, socially responsible literary life, and his nonfiction forte is telling the story of compelling individuals who have faced unfathomable adversity, as in Zeitoun (2009), the story of a Syrian American in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Here Eggers portrays Yemeni American Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who, after an unruly childhood in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, a transformative stay in Yemen with his grandfather, and success as a car salesman, finally finds his calling, which proves to be quixotic and dangerous: he commits himself to restoring Yemen's long-forgotten standing as the world's first and best coffee producer. Eggers crisply recounts coffee's delectably roguish history, into which Mokhtar's Sisyphean struggles fit perfectly. Just as fast-talking, improvisational, kind, and monomaniacal Mokhtar attempts, against epic odds, to rekindle the lost art of quality coffee cultivation in Yemen, the country descends into a civil war made worse by al-Qaeda, Saudi bombings, and U.S. drone attacks. He repeatedly ends up in terrifying and dire situations, relying on his wits and bravado to save him and his companions. Readers will never take coffee for granted or overlook the struggles of Yemen after ingesting Egger's phenomenally well-written, juggernaut of a tale of an intrepid and irresistible entrepreneur on a complex and meaningful mission. This highly caffeinated adventure story is ready-made for the big screen. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers, gifted and giving, will tour and make all kinds of media appearances with Alkhanshali, guaranteeing elevated interest in this broadly appealing true story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
September 1, 2017
The son of Yemini immigrants living in San Francisco, 24-year-old Mokhtar Alkhanshali works as a doorman until he becomes interested in coffee and journeys to his parents' homeland to learn more about its cultivation and help Yemeni farmers return their crops to the renown they once had. All's well until the 2015 civil war breaks out, the U.S. embassy shuts its doors, and Mokhtar finds he's a U.S. citizen trapped in the crosscurrents of sectarian violence. With author appearances in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 26, 2018
Actor Graham proves he’s a natural storyteller in this excellent reading of Eggers’s account of the life of an ill-educated 25-year-old Yemeni-American raised in poverty in San Francisco. After discovering that coffee originated in Yemen, Mokha Alkhanshali creates for himself a mission: to restore Yemeni coffee to its original quality and fame. In doing so, he develops an encyclopedic understanding of the complicated processes of growing, harvesting, and transporting coffee beans, and learns how to judge their quality. Mokha’s entrepreneurial quest takes him to Yemen to make final importing arrangements just as the country falls into civil war and international crisis. Graham’s ever-changing intonation, well-handled accents, and nuanced characterizations keep listeners riveted through harrowing acts of bravery, heartrending setbacks, and hair-raising events. A Knopf hardcover.
Starred review from November 1, 2017
For a son of Yemeni immigrants, the American dream takes the form of reawakening his ancestral homeland to its coffee legacy, the foundation for the industry he hopes to build.In his latest book, acclaimed novelist and McSweeney's founder Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier, 2016, etc.) offers an appealing hybrid: a biography of a charming, industrious Muslim man who has more ambition than direction; a capsule history of coffee and its origins, growth, and development as a mass commodity and then as a niche product; the story of Blue Bottle, the elite coffee chain in San Francisco that some suspect (and some fear) could turn into the next Starbucks; an adventure story of civil war in a foreign country; and a most improbable and uplifting success story. The protagonist, Mokhtar Alkhanshali, not only made it back from Yemen after the U.S. Embassy had closed, leaving remaining American citizens to their own devices, but he was followed by a boatload of some of the richest, best coffee the world has known, "the most expensive coffee Blue Bottle has ever sold...$16 a cup." One delicious irony is that neither the author nor his subject had been much interested in coffee exotica, with the former initially dismissing anyone "who waited in line for certain coffees made certain ways...[as] pretentious and a fool," while the latter had only had a couple dozen cups of coffee in his life before he became a grader of beans and then an importer. But this book is about much more than coffee or Muslim immigrants or the conflicts in Yemen--it is about the undeniable value of "U.S. citizens who maintain strong ties to the countries of their ancestors and who, through entrepreneurial zeal and dogged labor, create indispensable bridges between the developed and developing worlds, between nations that produce and those that consume."Eggers gives his hero a lot of thematic baggage to carry, but it is hard to resist the derring-do of the Horatio Alger of Yemenite coffee.
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