I just felt there was a big disconnect between Yemen and the coffee world, and I wanted to be the bridge. The Mokha Foundation Scholarships were established by Dave Eggers and Mokhtar Alkhanshali and are administered by ScholarMatch. Eggers tends to rely too heavily on the visual—sometimes, the shockingly graphic (“Mokhtar’s earliest memory of San Francisco was of a man defecating on a Mercedes”)—and on factoids that give the story a generic feel. Hopefully when the war does end, I will have laid the foundation for people to follow in my footsteps. But Dave Eggers did a great job presenting everything in an organized and conversational tone that had the book reading more like an autobiography in which I imagined Moktar sitting down to tell me his own story.

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

From scamming in the Tenderloin to dodging bombs in Yemen, Mokhtar and Eggers take us on a worthwhile ride through the postmodern topography of our times. He used to walk through the terraced farms with his grandmother and pick bright red coffee cherries - the fruit that holds the coffee beans - right off the trees. He spent three years traveling to more than 30 coffee-growing regions in Yemen, many accessible only on foot through the mountains.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. But on March 25, just days before he was scheduled to leave, the already-weakened government in Yemen collapsed, and overnight the country fell into chaos. Mokhtar does not seem to be in on the joke at all, with the play of words on Milton and Joseph Campbell.

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers | Goodreads The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers | Goodreads

This is not necessarily inexplicable, but it would have given his character more depth if this contrast had been explored more. Q: Mokhtar, you discovered your family’s connection to coffee, and the Yemeni connection to coffee, when you were in your early twenties. I hope eventually to post discussion questions for all of the books we've covered since I took over a couple of years ago and beyond, all the way to the beginning over a decade and a half ago. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral homeland to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains and meet beleagured but determined farmers. Cranking up the rhetoric, in a way clearly meant to challenge the demonization of Muslims and people of color by the current U.

Are you just generally a fearless person, or does some absurdist side of you kick in during moments of grave danger? As a child, Mokhtar traveled with his parents back to the mountain town of Ibb, Yemen, where his family is from. that what contributed to Mokhtar separating himself from the other junkies where he lived - is HE ALWAYS LOVED TO READ AS A KID.

Monk of Mokha - Dave Eggers

Five years ago, Mokhtar Alkhanshali didn’t drink coffee, despite having deep connections to its birthplace. He sells his coffee for more than 5 times more than the commodity coffee, and his suppliers just see a 30% increase, while they had been promised 5 times more?It is thought that sometime in the mid-1600’s, an Indian pilgrim smuggled seven green coffee seeds out of the country, and from those seeds, coffee cultivation spread across the planet and grew into a worldwide commodity.

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers review – smell the coffee

When he drinks this brew, it lifts his spirit, awakens his senses, and allows him to pray and study through the night. The book follows Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young man from a family of Yemeni immigrants in California who decides, in 2013, without much in the way of capital or formal education, to go on an adventurous quest to import coffee from Yemen. This well-meaning American exceptionalism, with its cutesy recycling of a phrase (“irrational exuberance”) meant as a critique of the market by, of all people, Alan Greenspan, strikes me as even more depressing than the barbaric version of American exceptionalism put forth on a regular basis by Donald Trump. For those of you that haven't or couldn't attend book club lately, we'll be publishing the previous months' discussion questions here. From there, we set about building infrastructure: bringing in modern equipment, such as drying beds and moisture analyzers, along with modern agricultural methods employed by top producers in coffee regions like Panama.Similar questions arise about almost everyone else Mokhtar encounters during this escape, from various members of militias resisting Houthi rebels—men in tank tops and tracksuits who wave guns with abandon—to crazed prisoners who have soiled themselves in crammed, makeshift cells. It is interesting, as people occasionally say memoirs on a topic can be too biased, but this seems the flip side where a bit more framing would have been preferred. If you have read other works by Eggers, how does this book compare to those books from a stylistic perspective? It was vacuum packing that enabled coffee beans to be kept fresh as they made the journey from where they were farmed. For a guy as young as Mokhtar to simply reinvent himself, to risk so much to re-create his life, it’s astonishing.