The Monk of Mokha

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NEXT time you slurp a cup of coffee, spare a thought for the humble bean that produced it. In Dave Eggers' latest socially conscious non-fiction book, a bean's journey involves being trapped in a city pounded by Saudi bombs and twice being taken captive by armed militia, and escaping a war-torn country by fibre boat to make it to a cup. The Monk of Mokha is the exhilarating 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, far right, makes coffee for farmers in Yemen, many of whom had never tasted their own beans brewed. A real life, modern adventure story that is ripe for movie making. Mokhtar Alkhanshani rediscovers the Yemen coffee producing history and globally brings Yemen coffee to recognition and production. His dangerous journey reveals the beautiful but tumultuous setting of Yemen that has been subjected to uprisings, revolutions, invasion, kidnappings and bombings all within recent history. Mokhtar is an inspiration and a role model of ingenuity and hard work leading to great success.

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers - BookBrowse Reviews of The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers - BookBrowse

Monk of Mokha is the 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. Discuss the role of family in Mokhtar’s personal and professional life. What expectations are laid upon him as the son of Yemeni immigrants? What values do Mokhtar’s parents instill in him? How does his family aid him in his journey to create his business?Q: Mokhtar, you come from a prominent Yemeni tribe, many of whom are still in Yemen. What are their lives like now, and what has it been like to see the country deteriorate over these last few years? Dave Eggers is an engaging writer and at times his prose is quite masterful. This book does not read like most non-fiction books, it is a fast read and carefully constructed. Eggers’ style reminds me a little of Hampton Sides, who is one of my favorite authors. A heady brew… Plainspoken but gripping …Dives deep into a crisis but delivers a jolt of uplift as well.” —Mark Athitakis, USA Today 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 Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four, unable to pay for college, and working as a doorman when he becomes fascinated with the rich history of coffee. He travels to Yemen and visits countless farms, collecting samples, eager to bring improved cultivation methods to the countryside. In 2015 he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs the country. The US Embassy closes, Saudi bombs rain down, and Mokhtar is trapped in Yemen, desperate to escape. A heart-pounding true story, The Monk of Mokha weaves together the history of coffee, the ongoing Yemeni civil war, and the courageous journey of a young man--a Muslim and a US citizen--following the most American of dreams.

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers | Goodreads

E]very biography is a kind of love story between the author and their subject. And if Eggers leans a bit too heavily on the over-earnest mythologization of an American citizen with deep Yemeni roots during the disastrous Trump presidency, who — really — could blame him? Eggers is using his formidable literary powers and cachet to amplify the stories of victimized people in a moment of crisis — and he's doing so in the form of a gripping, triumphant adventure story. If more breakout literary sensations parlayed their celebrity into meaningful acts of citizenship, maybe kids like Alkhanshali wouldn't have to struggle quite so hard to find a place in the world. After Alkhanshali’s aha moment in that San Francisco café, he researched and studied coffee obsessively, even training to become a certified Q grader from the Coffee Quality Institute. He spent three years traveling to more than 30 coffee-growing regions in Yemen, many accessible only on foot through the mountains. “I went through shootouts and explosions. I got tapeworm and malaria and gall bladder stones. I lost 49 pounds the first year,” he says. “But I always say my journey was a beautiful struggle. I got to meet amazing people, and I knew there was something there.” Moktar, a Muslim Yemeni American who grew up in a tough neighborhood in San Francisco called The Tenderloin, was a restless young man who knew how to survive in any situation, but had a habit of cutting corners and cutting school, and abandoning secure jobs, and even losing money and opportunities to further his education. But he was also intelligent and resourceful, and he was driven to be an activist, spurred on by his great pride in his Yemeni heritage. This is the true story of a young man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali who grew up in the Bay Area of California whose family is originally from Yemen. He does some incredibly brave and difficult things to help his ancestral country and the farmers who are struggling there.The main problem: In this book, Mokhtar is a one-dimensional superhero, with one superpower: He can talk himself out of any situation. But obstacle courses were nothing new to Moktar. And he had made up his mind. He would resurrect Yemeni coffee by marketing it as a specialty coffee and reviving the ancient varieties. There was still the little matter of finding a way to get the coffee out of war-torn Yemen should it even be good enough to compete in quality. But he would worry about that later when he got to that point. Discuss the difference in atmosphere between Mokhtar’s first experience living in Yemen as a teenager and his travels there as an adult. How does his understanding of the country change as he matures? Discuss the effect of the civil war on Yemeni culture. How does Mokhtar navigate this environment? What advantages does he have as an American citizen? Throughout The Monk of Mokha, the concept of code-switching is discussed, particularly in relation to Mokhtar’s status as both an American citizen and that of a Yemeni American. Discuss situations wherein he is deemed “not American enough” or “not Yemeni enough.” How is he forced to adapt his behavior based on his social setting? How does he contend with situations of injustice?

of Mokha Story – Port of Mokha

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. While out on a date with Miriam, she points out a statue depicting a Yemeni man drinking coffee to Mokhtar. Taken by this image, Mokhtar does some reading, discovering that Yemen is where the first coffee was brewed, but years of internal strife and civil war have decimated the Yemeni coffee industry. Although he did not drink much coffee, Mokhtar decides he will launch a business importing coffee from Yemen to America. He studies coffee brewing and meets Willem Boot, who offers to fund a trip to Yemen. I love coffee, I drink it every day. Always arabica coffee! It was fun to learn about it’s history as well as its future. Don’t you know Yemenis were the first to export coffee? Yemenis basically invented coffee. You didn’t know this?Yemen was the first country in the world to begin commercially cultivating coffee in the 16th century, with the sole supply of beans coming out of the Port of Mokha for more than a century. But drought, drug production and civil unrest led to the decline of coffee quality and supply until Yemen virtually dropped off the coffee map. Alkhanshali was determined to see that change. “I had no idea what I would have to go through educationally and physically,” he says. “You could say I was naively arrogant. I just felt there was a big disconnect between Yemen and the coffee world, and I wanted to be the bridge.” Dave Eggers is an engaging storyteller with a flair for dramatic moments, and his biography of Yemeni American entrepreneur Mokhtar Alkhanshali combines a well-paced series of heroic misadventures with fascinating coffee facts. The narrative spans continents, cultures and centuries to explore the history of coffee and to describe current events in Yemen. Mokhtar is characterized as a complex, modern Sinbad the Sailor, venturing far to make his rags-to-riches dream come true... continued This is a non-fiction book that is part biography, part adventure story and part business book. The standard for the combination biography-business book is set by Walter Isaacson's superb biography about Steve Jobs. Isaacson combines a layered multifaceted description of Jobs' character with key business insights. On both of these dimensions, the Monk of Mokha falls short.

Monk of Mokha - Dave Eggers

Both in school and at an after-school program at a mosque, Mokhtar is a corner cutter who finds trouble difficult to avoid. However, not much later he is described as an autodidact, who reads plenty of books. Again, an exploration of this contrast, that could give more understanding of his personality, is missing from the book. By hand, Mokhtar couldn't open both doors. They were too heavy and too big. With the button, though, the resident could stride through a fantastically wide and welcoming gateway of glass, unobstructed. They could enter the lobby, and Moktar, the Lobby Ambassador, could greet them. He'd be happy to greet them. It cost him nothing to look up and say hello. But to leap from the desk, to rush over, eager and panting, only to push open a door that could be opened with a button – it was a self-evident outrage and an assault on his pride. Especially when the residents passed through the lobby, entered the elevators and flew up, to apartments high above him, places he'd never seen. Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.’ Eggers spends a fair amount of the novel looking at how Mokhtar wanted to ensure he was using his dream to not only celebrate Yemen history but help the people there (though often in life ‘ethical capitalism’ is a bit of an oxymoron). There is a great section of the novel where the woman at one of the processing factories privately informs Mokhtar of the abuse and ethical mistreatment of employees at the facility, so he creates his own and hires those employees.The world of coffee connoisseurs and that big budget high culture society is nicely illustrated throughout The Monk of Mokha. The words “toasty” and “fruity” are rampant, and Mokhtar needs to become part of that culture. Certainly the story Eggers wants to tell here involves the heroic journey Mokhtar takes from being an aimless 20-something Yemeni immigrant to an empire king who brings the beans to the United States from Yemen at the risk of his own life. The deeper story is political, and Eggers makes that clear: The Monk of Mokha is the true story of a young Yemeni American man named Mokhtar who became fascinated with coffee, especially its origin in Yemen. He wanted to elevated the quality of coffee there and bring it to the world, while also ensuring that the local coffee farmers are paid a more fair share for their hard work so that they can make a living wage. While Mokhtar was working to achieve this, Yemen was embroiled in a civil war, making his mission even harder and sometimes mortally perilous. MA: For most of my life I was terrified of small dogs so no, I don’t think of myself as a fearless person. People often ask how I managed living with violence and guns in Yemen. I grew up in Brooklyn and the Tenderloin [in San Francisco], the first time a gun was put in my face was here in the U.S when I was 11 years old. There are only two countries in the world that own more guns per capita than Yemen, and one of those is the US. In those instances that you mentioned of extreme danger in Yemen, I was able to not react but to respond and figure out what I needed to do to survive because I had already been equipped with that mechanism from an early age growing up in the inner-city in the US. The author reminds us that Yemen was the birthplace of the coffee plant and that some four hundred years ago the Dutch smuggled coffee plants out of Yemen. The beans and plants were eventually distributed around the world to places like South America where the climate led to a better yield and the number of workers were much higher than Yemen. So in a few centuries Yemen coffee was forgotten about. In 2014, at the time of this story, coffee was still grown in Yemen but not as an export. There was so little remaining farming knowledge that even separating out the high quality beans from the low quality beans was not practiced.