The Monk of Mokha is the third in [Eggers's] series of real-life accounts of immigrants to America caught in the jaws of history…Each book is a tale of a latter-day Job and a reflection on the act of storytelling itself, none more so than this latest, in which a singularly reckless young man keeps himself alive like Scheherazade—his ability to spin stories ensures his survival…Narrative nonfiction…is [Eggers's] natural home. Telling other people's stories seems to focus him. The sentences take on an Orwellian clarity—they're lean and clean…In The Monk of Mokha, he moves lightly between story and analysis, and between brisk histories of Yemeni immigration to America; gentrifying San Francisco; coffee cultivation…and the saints and thieves who dispersed the beans around the world.
The Monk of Mokha
Narrated by Dion Graham
Dave EggersUnabridged — 8 hours, 18 minutes
The Monk of Mokha
Narrated by Dion Graham
Dave EggersUnabridged — 8 hours, 18 minutes
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Overview
From bestselling author Dave Eggers, the incredible true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war.
Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four and working as a doorman when he discovers the astonishing history of coffee and Yemen's central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral homeland to tour terraced farms high in the country's rugged mountains and meet beleaguered but determined farmers. But when war engulfs the country and Saudi bombs rain down, Mokhtar has to find a way out of Yemen without sacrificing his dreams or abandoning his people.
Editorial Reviews
03/26/2018
Actor Graham proves he’s a natural storyteller in this excellent reading of Eggers’s account of the life of an ill-educated 25-year-old Yemeni-American raised in poverty in San Francisco. After discovering that coffee originated in Yemen, Mokha Alkhanshali creates for himself a mission: to restore Yemeni coffee to its original quality and fame. In doing so, he develops an encyclopedic understanding of the complicated processes of growing, harvesting, and transporting coffee beans, and learns how to judge their quality. Mokha’s entrepreneurial quest takes him to Yemen to make final importing arrangements just as the country falls into civil war and international crisis. Graham’s ever-changing intonation, well-handled accents, and nuanced characterizations keep listeners riveted through harrowing acts of bravery, heartrending setbacks, and hair-raising events. A Knopf hardcover. (Feb.)
10/30/2017
Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier) tells the exciting true story of a Yemeni-American man’s attempts to promote his ancestral country’s heritage, giving both a timely gloss on the traditional American dream and a window into the nightmare of contemporary political instability. The book first finds Mokhtar Alkhanshali as an ambitious but unfocused 25-year-old who has held a series of odd jobs in the Bay Area—including as a car salesman and doorman. He finds unexpected direction in 2013, when he learns that coffee originated 500-years earlier in his family’s native country, under the oversight of the titular Sufi holy man. This revelation sends him on an entrepreneurial quest to revitalize the long-dormant Yemeni coffee industry. Alkhanshali’s education in the coffee business provides a fascinating glimpse at how coffee is grown and processed today, but his path takes a startling turn in 2015 when Alkhanshali visits Yemen to make final importing arrangements just as the country collapses into civil war. The narrative turns into an increasingly surreal account of Alkhanshali’s efforts to elude imprisonment and even death in order to get the coffee-bean samples he has secured back to America. Eggers’s book works as both a heartwarming success story with a winning central character and an account of real-life adventures that read with the vividness of fiction. (Jan.)
Exquisitely interesting… This is about the human capacity to dream—here, there, everywhere.” —Gabriel Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle
“A cracking tale of intrigue and bravery… A gripping, triumphant adventure story.” —Paul Constant, Los Angeles Times
"I wish someone had asked me to blurb The Monk of Mokha so I could have said, 'I couldn’t put it down,' because I couldn’t put it down." —Ann Patchett, Parnassas Bookstore blog
“A true account of a scrappy underdog, told in a lively, accessible style... Absolutely as gripping and cinematically dramatic as any fictional cliffhanger.” —Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post
“Remarkable… offers hope in the age of Trump… Ends as a kind of breathless thriller as Mokhtar braves militia roadblocks, kidnappings and multiple mortal dangers.” —Tim Adams, The Guardian
“A heady brew… Plainspoken but gripping… Dives deep into a crisis but delivers a jolt of uplift as well.” —Mark Athitakis, USA Today
"A vibrant depiction of courage and passion, interwoven with a detailed history of Yemeni coffee and a timely exploration of Muslim American identity." —David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
“The Monk of Mokha is not merely about ‘coming to America,’ it is a thrilling chronicle of one man’s coming-and-going between two beloved homelands—a brilliant mirror on the global community we have become.” —Marie Arana, author of American Chica and Bolivar: American Liberator
“This American coming of age story reminds us all of how much our country is enriched by all who call it home.” —Dalia Mogahed, author of Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think
“Here’s a story for our time: filled with ethos and pathos. You’ll laugh, cry, and discover worlds unknown to most. 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.” —Hamza Hanson Yusuf
“Like many great works, Eggers’ book is multifaceted. It combines, in a single moving narrative, history, politics, biography, psychology, adventure, drama, despair, hope, triumph and the irrepressible, indomitable nature of the human spirit –at its best.” —Imam Zaid Shakir
“In telling Mokhtar’s story with such clarity, honesty, and humor, Eggers allows readers to consider Yemen and Yemenis – long invisible, side-lined, or maligned in the American imagination – in their wonderful and complicated fullness.” —Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria and A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories
09/01/2017
The son of Yemini immigrants living in San Francisco, 24-year-old Mokhtar Alkhanshali works as a doorman until he becomes interested in coffee and journeys to his parents' homeland to learn more about its cultivation and help Yemeni farmers return their crops to the renown they once had. All's well until the 2015 civil war breaks out, the U.S. embassy shuts its doors, and Mokhtar finds he's a U.S. citizen trapped in the crosscurrents of sectarian violence. With author appearances in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.
Dion Graham narrates this stirring audiobook splendidly. His narration shapes the mind and spirit of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni-American from San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood who pursues his dream to import coffee from his ancestral home. Graham delivers a fine reading of his harrowing experiences: He’s detained at gunpoint, drives his coffee samples cross country during Saudi bombing raids, and enters Ethiopia without papers. Listeners will be rapt. Graham’s performance brings the two worlds of San Francisco’s specialty coffee scene and civil war-torn Yemen together as the story charts the course of the intrepid hero. Mokhtar’s mission is to create an import business to help Yemenis sell their world-class product abroad. How he succeeds makes for a remarkable audiobook. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
★ 2017-10-10
For a son of Yemeni immigrants, the American dream takes the form of reawakening his ancestral homeland to its coffee legacy, the foundation for the industry he hopes to build.In his latest book, acclaimed novelist and McSweeney's founder Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier, 2016, etc.) offers an appealing hybrid: a biography of a charming, industrious Muslim man who has more ambition than direction; a capsule history of coffee and its origins, growth, and development as a mass commodity and then as a niche product; the story of Blue Bottle, the elite coffee chain in San Francisco that some suspect (and some fear) could turn into the next Starbucks; an adventure story of civil war in a foreign country; and a most improbable and uplifting success story. The protagonist, Mokhtar Alkhanshali, not only made it back from Yemen after the U.S. Embassy had closed, leaving remaining American citizens to their own devices, but he was followed by a boatload of some of the richest, best coffee the world has known, "the most expensive coffee Blue Bottle has ever sold…$16 a cup." One delicious irony is that neither the author nor his subject had been much interested in coffee exotica, with the former initially dismissing anyone "who waited in line for certain coffees made certain ways…[as] pretentious and a fool," while the latter had only had a couple dozen cups of coffee in his life before he became a grader of beans and then an importer. But this book is about much more than coffee or Muslim immigrants or the conflicts in Yemen—it is about the undeniable value of "U.S. citizens who maintain strong ties to the countries of their ancestors and who, through entrepreneurial zeal and dogged labor, create indispensable bridges between the developed and developing worlds, between nations that produce and those that consume."Eggers gives his hero a lot of thematic baggage to carry, but it is hard to resist the derring-do of the Horatio Alger of Yemenite coffee.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169210224 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 533,008 |
Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Monk of Mokha"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Dave Eggers.
Excerpted by permission of Diversified Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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