The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennet Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

From the Publisher

Caffeine is the world's most popular drug! Almost all of us start our day with a jolt of caffeine from coffee, tea or cola. And many of us crave chocolate when we're stressed or depressed. Without it we're lethargic, head-achy and miserable. Why? Why do we crave caffeine? How much do we really know about our number one drug of choice?
Here is the first natural, cultural, and artistic history of our favorite mood enhancer—how it was discovered, its early uses, and the unexpected parts it has played in medicine, religion, painting, poetry, learning, and love. Weinberg and Bealer tell an intriguing story of a remarkable substance that has figured prominently in the exchanges of trade and intelligence among nations and whose most common sources, coffee, tea, and chocolate, have been both promoted as productive of health and creativity and banned as corrupters of the body and mind or subverters of social order.

Some Highlights From the World of Caffeine

Balzac's addiction to caffeine drove him to eat coffee, as some schizophrenic patients are observed to do today, and may have killed him
Mary Tuke breaks the male monopoly on tea in England in 1725
The ways caffeine functions as a "smart pill"
Goethe's responsibility for the discovery of caffeine
Did a mini Ice Age help bring coffee, tea and chocolate to popularity in Europe?
What is the mystery of coffee's origin?
As good as gold: the stories of how caffeine, in its various forms, was used as cash in China, Africa, Central America and Egypt
What does the civet cat have to do with the most costly coffee on earth today?

The World of Caffeine is a captivating tale of artand society — from India to Balzac to cybercafes — and the ultimate caffeine resource.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

With impressive felicity, Weinberg and Bealer marshal the forces of history, chemistry, medicine, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy and even a little religion to tell caffeine's complicated story…fascinating, generously illustrated volume.

Internet Book Watch

Most Americans use some form of caffine on a daily basis, and it's the only addictive substance which is freely available almost everywhere. World Of Caffine provides the first cultural and social history of caffine, examining the science and health facts surrounding caffine and how caffine spread around the world. The historical and social backgrounds are fascinating.

Kirkus Reviews

A savory and spirited cultural history of caffeine, with summaries of pertinent scientific and medical research on the properties and effects of the world's drug of choice. Weinberg and Bealer (freelance writers with backgrounds, respectively, in the hard and social sciences) fill their amazing book to the brim with a challenging mix of history, science, medicine, anthropology, sociology, and popular culture, then add a dash of humor, a pinch of polemic, and a dollop of healthful skepticism. Caffeine, a"bitter, highly toxic white powder, readily soluble in boiling water," was first isolated and named in 1819 by a young German physician. But it had been employed as far back as the middle of the 15th century, when the first coffee was brewed in southern Arabia. By the middle of the 16th century,"coffeehouses [had sprung] up in every major city in Islam"; soon, travelers to the Middle East sampled the drink, enjoyed its effects, and took it back to their own countries. The authors then focus on tea, establishing 220 b.c. as"genuinely the earliest reference" to the beverage and speculating that the Chinese may have learned to brew it from people in northern India or southeast Asia. They trace the other principal dietary source of caffeine, chocolate, to the Mesoamerican Olmecs, who flourished from 1500 to 400 b.c. and first used the cacao bean to make a chocolate drink. Chronicling the spread of these substances to Europe, Weinberg and Bealer note that coffee was often touted for its supposed medicinal properties ("comforts the Brain and dries up Crudities in the Stomach," claimed one 18th-century publication). In the most engaging portion here, a long section dealing withtheculture of caffeine, the authors trace its social role. Wisely, they delay until the final chapters slower-going discussions of the chemistry of caffeine and the immense amount of medical research devoted to it. Well-researched, briskly written, full-bodied, and flavorful. (50 halftones and line drawings)

Product Details

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Table of Contents