The Monk of Mokha

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Mokhtar grew up dirt poor......in San Francisco’s most impoverished districts: The Tenderloin District ( our older daughter once played the leading role in an indi film - at age 12 in this district- an area any mother would worry for her child) . By the end of “The Monk of Mokha”, without a sip of coffee or ( tea for me), in me, I felt the stimulant of Dave Eggers non fiction book raising my energy. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Eggers spends a fair amount of the novel looking at how Mokhtar wanted to ensure he was using his dream to not only celebrate Yemen history but help the people there (though often in life ‘ethical capitalism’ is a bit of an oxymoron). There is a great section of the novel where the woman at one of the processing factories privately informs Mokhtar of the abuse and ethical mistreatment of employees at the facility, so he creates his own and hires those employees. This book made me appreciate coffee more. This is the kind of book that keeps you on the edge of the seat while rooting for the main guy to get over the obstacles and attain the goals they need to get.

The Coffee-Flavored American Dream - The New York Times The Coffee-Flavored American Dream - The New York Times

From the best-selling author of The Circle, the true story of a young Yemeni-American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war. Dave Eggers’s The Monk of Mokha (2018), the third in a series of nonfiction books in which Eggers explores the lives of modern-day immigrants in America, tells the real-life story of Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali. Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha… first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee… He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God… The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy… That said, it is a riveting book and one you can read in two or three sittings. This is a hard one to put down, from the writing, the story and because he is so likable. Its also a great one to recommend to people, from big coffee aficionados to those with just a passing interest in coffee or Yemen. This would make a great beach read for non-fiction readers. It is an interesting story that shows the power of determination to make your dreams come true, though at the same time reminds you that investors are the gatekeepers and often want to market your story more than your quality. A fun book, but one that reads more like a marketing piece than a non-fiction study on any of the topics within. But most importantly, this book is a good reminder of how many people are involved in the coffee process from farm to table and that we should value and respect those working hard in the fields so we can enjoy this wonderful beverage. Q: Mokhtar, you still operate your company, Port of Mokha coffee, which continues to import coffee beans from war-torn Yemen. How much more difficult has the work become, and how are your workers and farmers faring amid the chaos?While out on a date with Miriam, she points out a statue depicting a Yemeni man drinking coffee to Mokhtar. Taken by this image, Mokhtar does some reading, discovering that Yemen is where the first coffee was brewed, but years of internal strife and civil war have decimated the Yemeni coffee industry. Although he did not drink much coffee, Mokhtar decides he will launch a business importing coffee from Yemen to America. He studies coffee brewing and meets Willem Boot, who offers to fund a trip to Yemen. Like many great works, Eggers’ book is multifaceted. It combines, in a single moving narrative, history, politics, biography, psychology, adventure, drama, despair, hope, triumph and the irrepressible, indomitable nature of the human spirit –at its best.” —Imam Zaid Shakir By hand, Mokhtar couldn't open both doors. They were too heavy and too big. With the button, though, the resident could stride through a fantastically wide and welcoming gateway of glass, unobstructed. They could enter the lobby, and Moktar, the Lobby Ambassador, could greet them. He'd be happy to greet them. It cost him nothing to look up and say hello. But to leap from the desk, to rush over, eager and panting, only to push open a door that could be opened with a button – it was a self-evident outrage and an assault on his pride. Especially when the residents passed through the lobby, entered the elevators and flew up, to apartments high above him, places he'd never seen.

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers - BookBrowse Reviews of The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers - BookBrowse

I read this book because it was written by Dave Eggers. I absolutely loved "Zeitoun". I liked "What Is The What" and "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?" Yemen is also not a very safe place. There was an organized evacuation for American citizens. And the State Department offered vague indications that Yemeni Americans should find passage out of the country by any means available. The funeral was a target—terrorists had made a habit of bombing funeral gatherings to double their body count. This is where Mokhtar will come in, not just as a Yemeni coffee roaster but also as a vehicle for Eggers’s message. Here iss a young man in his mid-20s willing to embark on a dangerous and insane quest to recreate that trade route and re-ignite the trade itself. He manages to persuade hundreds of coffee farmers in his homeland to give up growing khat (a native tobacco-like product) and start growing Arabica. This is all undertaken by Mokhtar in time when Yemen is exploding in sectarian war and famine. He has another story to tell when at age 24 he moves to Yemen....where he learns the language- culture and works in coffee farming. He also got trapped in the violent civil war. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Even a four dollar cup [of coffee] was miraculous, given how many people were involved… in that four dollar cup… even at four dollars a cup, chances were that some person-or many people, or hundreds of people-along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited. There are a few strands to this ambition: the literacy project 826 Valencia, now with “chapters” in cities across America; the oral history initiative Voices of Witness, which has produced more than a dozen anthologies of testament from groups including female prisoners in US jails, Burmese dissidents, undocumented refugees; and, the headline act, Eggers’s own ongoing literary output. His 2006 novel What Is the What, a fictionalised account of the life of a Sudanese refugee, Achak Deng, a “lost boy” who had fetched up in Atlanta, Georgia, was the start of this commitment. It was followed by Zeitoun (2009), the story of a Syrian-American painter and builder in New Orleans in the year of Hurricane Katrina. After The Circle(2013), his dystopian satire of Silicon Valley, The Monk of Mokha is a further refinement of this effort. Mokhtar’s tale starts out as a story of second-generation immigrant assimilation and becomes a history of coffee culture Mokhtar Alkhanshali, far right, makes coffee for farmers in Yemen, many of whom had never tasted their own beans brewed. Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings brought up by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age twenty-four, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman, until a chance encounter awakens his interest in coffee and its rich history in Yemen. Reinventing himself, he sets out to learn about coffee cultivation, roasting and importing.