Heinrich Eduard Jacob (1889–1967)

Heinrich Eduard Jacob was a pacifist German Jew whose work was blacklisted by the Nazis since 1933. Nevertheless, in 1935 he managed to publish Myth and the Triumphal March of Coffee, as the saga of the commodity--this is a translation of that work.

Alas, I lost interest in this quickly. It's not a history like [b:Salt|2715|Salt A World History|Mark Kurlansky|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347586566s/2715.jpg|73206] or [b:Milk|19469|The Face on the Milk Carton (Janie Johnson, #1)|Caroline B. Cooney|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320405619s/19469.jpg|816295], with its straightforward tracings of the trading and sociopolitical impacts of a particular food. Instead, it seems to be a collection of stories and anecdotes about coffee, from a series of legends about how coffee was discovered in Yemen to Jacob's own stories of being in Brazil in 1931, when the state bought coffee only to destroy it, to increase the price of its own coffee shares. Many of the chapters are tangents into tobacco, Jewish thoughts on wine, Japanese poems about tea, or legends about Bacchus. A serious student, who already knows the history of the regions Jacob talks about, would probably have a great deal of fun with this book. But its poetry and poetic license is not for me--I want straight, footnoted facts.… (mehr)