100 books like Coffee Is Not Forever

Jonathan, with whom I worked on an earlier book on coffee with authors from around the world, presents the history of coffee in a wonderfully readable way. His book is filled with charming and informative photos and graphics. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire and a truly nice guy, Jonathan is an expert above all on Italian coffee. He is in demand, particularly for talks on coffee’s past and present in Europe.

Anyone who would like to understand how coffee flavors develop, which is key to raising your level of sophistication about coffee, should pick up this book. Roasting green coffee beans is an art and science for which people are always trying new methods. The Book of Roast provides a detailed look at the history of roasting, from stovetop to massive machines, and tells why the best roaster takes such meticulous care in handling the beans. The latest and best methods of roasting and preparing coffee beverages are covered. In places, the book becomes a bit technically challenging, but it remains quite readable. For me, it was a great exploration of science plus taste. As one coffee expert put it to me, you can reveal the flavors in good beans (and you can ruin them quickly while roasting), but you can never improve upon them.

The speciality coffee industry is now a mature global part of coffee culture, but this book captures the early excitement around it as it burst onto the global stage. How coffee companies sought out and bought coffee was completely rewritten during this time, and this book makes for a fascinating read.

Coffee, sex, travel, exotic locales, romance, and at long last love. This novel has it all, made vivid through the story of a more or less ordinary Englishman in the late 1890s who finds that he has a remarkable talent for discovering and describing the flavors and the problems in brewed coffee. He goes to Ethiopia to learn more about coffee. There his adventures become, shall we say, quite vivid, and some remarkable twists appear. Nicely written by an international best-selling author. Used copies are really cheap. You will have fun reading this with a great cup of coffee.

I picked up this book as research but I kept reading because it was fascinating.

I admire Greenpeace a great deal, and their style of direct action—they’re known for activists tying themselves to oil rigs or swarms of kayaks blockading ports to make a point—is a touchpoint for the activist organization in my series.

Willcox’s memoir about captaining one of Greenpeace’s famous ships often reads like a thriller, complete with chase scenes trying to escape the Russian military, and some of the anecdotes fall into the “truth stranger than fiction” category.

A very cool look at some impressive real-life activism that’s not wonky or preachy.

A basic foundation for Collapse 2020 is the collapse timetable presented in the Limits to Growth model. A key assumption is that, as the world population increases, there will be related extractions of natural resources. If not controlled, many of those resources will run out. This book reports the status of world resources as of 2014. The “good news” – if we can call it that – is that the rates of resource depletion track closely with the Limits to Growth model. This is “good news” because it confirms that the model is sound. That’s “good” because it means we can rely on that model to plan for the future. On the other hand, it’s actually “very bad news”, because it shows the world is already in very bad condition.

Its central thesis is that the deficiencies and environmental harm of major efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are being ignored, so that the privileged and elite can continue to live in comfort and affluence. The authors present evidence that advocates for alternative energy such as wind and solar greatly overestimate the potential of these sources to replace fossil fuel energy. At the same time, the development of wind and solar power has harmful environmental impacts, including the mining necessary to obtain rare earth minerals, the decimation of wilderness both in the process of obtaining minerals, and widely implementing wind and solar installations. The undue optimism associated with these activities makes it unnecessary for those who are already privileged to consider adopting a much less consumptive lifestyle.

While some of us like to imagine humans as separate from nature, one moment where that boundary dissolves is with death. Inescapably, we will all eventually decompose and become a part of our environment. In Aaron Sach’s book, nineteenth-century Americans reckon with death through the creation of carefully landscaped cemeteries. What I particularly love about Arcadian America is how Sachs weaves his own memoir about his encounters with mortality in with the history he’s telling, making it a gripping page-turner.

A welcome corrective to the trend of X number of things you can do in your personal life to save the Earth that won't threaten the rule of greedy polluters over the economy and government, Price's lighthearted book welcomes the reader with a smile but strikes hard against propaganda from corporate polluters while she stands up for climate justice. To help readers make a real difference, as opposed to doing things that feel helpful but really aren't like buying a Prius, Price does actually offer a few personal life changes, like buying less stuff or buying higher quality stuff at lower quantity. But most of her ideas are about thinking differently about the environment--such as Redefine Economy or even Redefine Extremism (greedheads, not environmentalists, are the real extremists). Or getting active in public policy--from the strikingly simple "Vote!" to "Join up locally--government & economy R us."

This one challenged me to get out of my historian’s bubble and confront the impacts of mining in the present and near future, especially those associated with the looming energy transition. Pollon blew me away with sobering facts, such as the need to mine 3 billion tons of minerals to stay below 2 degrees of global temperature increases.

I was also captivated by the author’s accounts of his travels to the front lines of the critical minerals boom, which paint a vivid portrait of the vast scale of development associated with lithium, copper, and nickel development. Pollon’s book reminded me that technological solutions to climate change (important as they are) come with their own environmental and human costs.