I am often very surprised when I pick up a book in a bookstore that looks as if it "might" be interesting, but probably not, then get totally enthralled with it. I am not sure why I picked up this book in the first place. Maybe it was because it had no dust cover as most new books to. Maybe because the cover was not filled with glowing recommendations from numerous "expert" critics (most of those contain comments that are taken out of the context of the original critique anyway). I really do not know, but I am glad that I did. This is a fascinating book.

This book was a learning experience for me. I am a coffee fiend, but knew nothing about coffee until I read this book (Note: I am not a coffee snob at all, and am mostly disgusted by people who are).

All that I knew about Yemen prior to the reading of this book was that it was a vicious land located in a corner of this world that is best avoided. Now I know that it is a beautiful country with a population that is most gracious, yet leery of "outsiders" (with good reason). It still is a place that I would prefer to avoid, but mostly because of the vicious outsiders who try to control it.

Did you know that the beverage that we call coffee was first made in Yemen? It was and it was made by the title character of this book, a Sufi monk who smuggled the first plants out of Ethiopia back when nobody in Ethiopia knew what those "weeds" were. Here in the United States, we think of Ethiopia as the home of coffee, but then we also tend to spell Mokha as Mocha as well.

This is not a textbook, but it certainly is a fascinating, non-fiction book about the middle East and the hazards of the coffee industry.

I passed this book along to a friend.