Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World

I love Michael Pollans audiobooks - he is great writer and superb narrator. Caffeine is no different - a blend of science, interviews and personal experiences around the joyfulness of coffee.Pollan covers the history of coffee, it’s consumption and production relatively swiftly but also thoroughly enough to provide some interesting details. However for any British listener, BBC In Our Time had an hour long episode on coffee which covered much the same story.Pollan also talks to Matthew Walker who wrote the excellent “Why we Sleep” and highlights the interesting points from that particular chapter in the book.The remaining pieces are around his own experience giving up coffee, which has some vague comments on how his sleep improved but he couldn’t wait to go back and have one. Which is how the story ends.It’s pretty short, only 2 hours of an audiobook and as I had already come across many of the points before, it wasn’t super new to me.But I still enjoyed, and if you some spare audible credits lying around, Michael Pollan will certainly keep you entertained for a couple of hours for one of them.

I am a big fan of Pollan. But this felt almost patronising. He is describing humanity, like a bunch of ants who are so used to a potentially dangerous drug, that we cannot see or even conceive of its effects. Then he proceeds to describe his experience of getting off caffeine and then trying it again. I know tons of people who are "addicted" to coffee, plenty of people who never drink it. I myself have been on and off coffee for extended periods of time. Trying coffee for the first time does not turn you in to an obsessive compulsive maniac, as he described it. Also the book is very short for the price.

Fun short read