Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup

Koehler (Darjeeling) nicely captures the natural beauty and mystery of the birthplace of Arabica coffee. He begins with a poetic description of Ethiopian province of Kafa and its highland rainforest (“A tartan of paths wove through the weedy expanses... the conical tukuls sat slight askew”) before detailing the history of Ethopia. Foreign explorers found it “nearly impenetrable” for centuries, which kept coffee a local secret. In the 17th century, traders and conquerors took the plant and tried growing it throughout the Arabian Peninsula and Europe. Koehler concludes this section with the downfall of what was once the rich kingdom of Kafa in 1897. In the second half of the book, Koehler focuses on contemporary coffee commerce and cultivation, outlining Starbucks’s rise to market dominance and the new wave of artisanal coffee purveyors. Koehler then explains how coffee could completely disappear off the face of the Earth because of the perfect storm the incurable coffee leaf rust fungus, rampant deforestation of the Ethopia cloud forests, and climate change. This is a wonderfully informative book about a bean on which many people rely. (Nov.)