"Coffeeland" is a fascinating look into the history of coffee through a focus on one coffee plantation family, the Hill family of El Salvador. Besides looking at the story of coffee as both a drink and a culture here in the United States, "Coffeeland" looks at some of the harder questions behind the coffee cup. How did coffee come to change El Salvador into a monoculture with vast gulfs between the very rich and the very poor? How has coffee influenced the economy of not only El Salvador, but much of Central America and the United States?

I was most interested with the first half of this book, where coffee is put in a global historical context. Fascinating factoids about coffee and its' history are the reasons I pick up a book like this. I definitely appreciated learning about El Salvador's troubled history with coffee from an economic and social perspective, and learned more about the revolutions and massacres of the country than I had expected. The only downside to this book was a tendency of the author to explain in extreme detail the entire history of an idea- whether that idea is the development of economic theory, communism, or anything else. I understand the idea was to firmly root coffee's importance to those ideas, but a more Cliff's Notes version would have not only made those sections easier to read, but I might have not glazed over them and therefore lost what was trying to be explained in the first place. Details and research are important, but so if knowing when only a little background will go a long way.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review