Augustine Sedgewick

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

“[A] beautifully written, engaging and sprawling portrait of how coffee made modern El Salvador, while it also helped to remake consumer habits worldwide.” —Lizabeth Cohen, New York Times Book Review

"Throughly engrossing . . . [Sedgewick's] literary gifts and prodigious research make for a deeply satisfying reading experience studded with narrative surprise." —Michael Pollan, The Atlantic

“Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick’s story reaches out into American political history, not to mention the history of American breakfast, but it is mostly set in El Salvador, where a large-scale monoculture of coffee began, at the turn of the twentieth century, under the fiendishly brilliant direction of a British expat named James Hill [ . . . .] The originality and ambition of Sedgewick’s work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer—Central American peasant and North American proletarian—not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker