If you’ve ever been curious about when and where coffee appeared in the world, you might enjoy reading Coffee and Coffeehouses by Ralph S. Hattox.
Hattox explores the mystery of coffee’s origins. Coffee enters history among the dervishes, members of a Moslem ascetic order, who used it to sustain their frenzied, whirling dances as acts of ecstatic devotion, and it quickly spread to coffeehouses in Mecca shortly after 1500. But, by that time, even though there were people still alive who remembered when coffee was unknown, the secret of where it came from had already been lost. In this book, the story is unravelled in a fascinating and scholarly way. If you’re up for a serious, well-written account, this book could be for you.
