BOOK
The Gist: how western civilization woke up and smelled the coffee
$27.50
One day in 1995, I was eating coconuts and freshly caught fish on Tapuaetai, a nearly uninhabited island in the South Pacific. Blue sky, clear water, litter-free beach - it was, without question, the most beautiful place I'd ever visited. But because I hadn't had my morning coffee, I was miserable. My head ached. I begged my companions for some kind of fix: Warm Pepsi? Used tea bag? NoDoz tablet? Nobody could help.
It's hard enough to bear a day without caffeine. It's harder to imagine a world without the drug. In this book, science writers Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer claim that at least 90 percent of the world's current population doses itself regularly with the bitter white alkaloid C8H10N4O2. That wasn't the case 400 years ago, when caffeine was unknown in Europe, and most everyone on the Continent was zonked out on alcohol all day. German sailors drank 3 gallons of beer daily; children and adults had beer soup for breakfast and drank until they passed out in the mud. It wasn't until caffeine (and the clock) was introduced, argue the authors, that Europe shook off a centuries-long hangover and began to build what we know as modern civilization.
With chapters devoted to the history, science, and cultural significance of coffee, tea, chocolate, and caffeinated soft drinks, The World of Caffeine reveals a great deal of surprising information about the chemical that we all take for granted. You'll learn, for instance, that Balzac went on occasional coffee benders, using increasingly stronger concoctions over a period of days, ending with him spooning dry coffee powder straight into his naturalistic craw.
You'll also get a lesson in the history of caffeine prohibition. In 1633, the vizier of Constantinople squelched a coffeehouse craze by rounding up customers, sewing them into bags, and throwing them in the river. In 1911, the US government took Coca-Cola to court for selling a dangerous caffeinated beverage, and called in expert witnesses who claimed that the use of Coke induced college girls to engage in wanton sexual behavior and drove boys to practice onanism. Caffeine prohibition continues to this day, according to the authors: In 1995, Chinese police broke up a ring of 17 caffeine dealers, seizing 85 pounds of powder caffeine and a million caffeine pills, both of which are controlled substances there. Why would anyone risk jail peddling caffeine in a country with such delicious, plentiful tea? I'll never know.
Routledge: www.routledge-ny.com.
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