By the time Mokhtar was in eighth grade, his parents worried he was going astray and decided he should spend time with his wealthy grandfather in Yemen. Maybe the change of location and immersion in history would do him good.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Mokhtar spoke some Arabic, but a street-smart American kid from the Tenderloin was predictably out of place in rural Yemen. Unfamiliar with local customs, he didn’t know how to dress, speak, eat or walk like a proper Yemeni.

This is where you expect the story to take a familiar turn: A smart Muslim kid from a rough neighborhood in the West, sent back to the motherland in an attempt to strengthen his roots, instead becomes disillusioned and lost between two identities before he finds solace and purpose in religious fundamentalism and jihad. Right?

Well, no.

Under the tutelage of his businessman grandfather, who brings him to meetings and on work trips, the adolescent Mokhtar is converted instead to the religion of capitalism. Back in America he takes a high school job at Banana Republic and starts dressing in sweater vests. His friends began calling him Rupert after the dapper comic-strip bear.

This book is about Mokhtar’s journey from the Tenderloin to the mountains of Yemen in pursuit of a dream. It is also about his personal journey, as he learns to navigate two identities and begins to find his true self.

Like Mokhtar himself, however, the book loses focus for long stretches, following him from job to job in arduous pages that go nowhere until Mokhtar, working as a doorman at a luxury building, sees a 20-foot-tall statue of a Yemeni man drinking from a giant coffee cup. He learns about the beverage’s origins — “Yemenis basically invented coffee. You didn’t know this?” his mother tells him — and feels at last that he has a mission. Finally we get a jolt of excitement and the book starts to flow.

Eggers traces the often contested history of coffee, from the Ethiopian shepherd who noticed that his goats were jumping and prancing after eating the fruit of a nearby tree, to Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi man living in Mokha who first brewed the drink we know today. Later Eggers tells us about the rogue adventurers who stole coffee and spread it to the rest of the world: Indonesia, Latin America, Africa.