Leo T. reviewed Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug on + 1775 more book reviews
I have not yet seen the book, but there is an essay reviewin month's Atlantic: Michael Pollan, The World's Favorite Drug, p. 84. The author has done excellent research into the many aspects from coffee's efficacy in energizing tired workers to the change in the landscape (and thus the lives of peons) in El Salvador when subsistence food crops were replaced with coffee bushes. I can't tell if it covers the descent on LA of the immigrants who tore up our neighborhoods, Westlake for example, with gangbangers and sold dope at the schoolyard gate nationwide.