The Monk of Mokha

Author and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers takes to the road for the launch of his new book, The Monk of Mokha. But this is no ordinary book tour: Dave will be traveling alongside Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the subject of the book, and their conveyance will be a San Francisco Public Library bookmobile, which they’ll park in front of five local bookstores in the two-day tour after their kick-off event at City Hall. See details above and read our review below . . .

Kristina’s Bookshelf

The Monk of Mokha
By Dave Eggers
(Knopf, 2018)  

Given the breadth of topics Dave Eggers has addressed in his fiction and nonfiction work, it would seem there’s no subject he can’t write about. Following the success of his early work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which chronicles his experience raising his younger brother in Berkeley after his parents died, Eggers has gone on to pen more than a dozen books on subjects that range from the life of a Syrian-American house painter in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Zeitoun), to the Lost Boys of Sudan (What is the What), to life in a tech start-up in Silicon Valley (The Circle). His latest, The Monk of Mokha, is the true story of a young, industrious Yemeni-American man living in San Francisco working as a doorman because he can’t afford to pay for college. Witnessing the coffee culture in San Francisco, his particular American dream becomes a desire to resurrect the storied coffee legacy in Yemen. He travels to Yemen and explores the coffee industry there, finds himself in Sana’a in the midst of civil war, and eventually makes his way back to the United States, bringing with him some of the highest quality coffee in the world. An absorbing adventure story, the book combines a portrait of a charming entrepreneur with a history of coffee and a description of the lives of ordinary people in the midst of civil war.

Edible East Bay’s book editor Kristina Sepetys is eager to share her ideas and book recommendations
with our readers.