The Devils Cup, Stewart Lee Allen
The Devils Cup, Stewart Lee Allen
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
Club: $9.49

The Devil's Cup
A History of the World According to Coffee

Author: Stewart Lee Allen

Narrator: Mitch Crawford

Unabridged: 8 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/26/2026

Synopsis

In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee, indeed, the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India's three Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ USA, where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea-drinkers) do so at their own peril.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dara on March 24, 2014

[image: [URL not allowed]] This is often my first immediate feeling about journalism and travelogue books. Dear author, you obviously did your research (as evidenced by lots of facts and by acknowledgements to a dozen libraries from different parts of the world - which as a librarian I really appr......more

Goodreads review by Richard on January 01, 2009

I'd lost track of this book. I knew I'd read a neat book about caffeine, but thought it was called Cafiends or something. Get it? Cafe-Fiend? I'm pretty sure there was a great all-night coffee shop in Christchurch, New Zealand, somewhere near Cathedral Square, with this name, way back in 1992. I mig......more

Goodreads review by Paul on October 19, 2013

Well, it's mostly about coffee, but coffee as a theme to unify a travel adventure story of the penniless backpacking variety. This is not a book I would have picked out for myself, but it was a book club selection and I'm glad now I read it. Allen's off-handed and fantastical claims as to the importa......more

Goodreads review by Kara on August 30, 2011

Not what I thought it would be - basically just a travelogue padded out with some facts here and there - it needed more history and less on-the-go navel gazing.......more

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