The Monk of Mokha

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A heady brew… Plainspoken but gripping …Dives deep into a crisis but delivers a jolt of uplift as well.” —Mark Athitakis, USA Today He has another story to tell when at age 24 he moves to Yemen....where he learns the language- culture and works in coffee farming. He also got trapped in the violent civil war.

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

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. 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. There was no room in the apartment for bookshelves, but on a shelf in the tiny kitchen pantry, below the canned goods and above the shelf that held the pasta and Sazón Goya seasoning, Mokhtar had carved out a home for the books he’d found. Discuss the Saul Bellow epigraph that opens The Monk of Mokha. How does this paragraph set the tone for Mokhtar’s story?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.

Monk of Mokha - Dave Eggers

I was blessed to hear Dave Eggers interview Mokhtar at the Library of Congress Book Festival on Sep 1 of this year. Having already read the book, I smiled and nodded throughout the 50 minutes of interview. It's a detail in the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, an aimless twentysomething from San Francisco's Tenderloin district who decided almost on a whim to become a coffee importer on learning that coffee had first been produced in his family's native Yemen. Knowing almost nothing about the industry (and having only ever drunk the odd cup of coffee to boot), he embarked on a research trip to his ancestral country, persuaded the last remaining farmers in Yemen's floundering coffee industry to sign up to his vision and was in the process of exporting several high-quality samples to the US when Yemen descended into civil war. San Francisco is an economically divided city, where stratification of wealth is readily apparent. At what point in Mokhtar’s life does he begin to understand this economic divide? How do his first jobs—at Banana Republic, at the Honda dealership, and later at the Infinity—provide him with a lens to understand wealth and power in the United States? How does his exposure to wealth change his worldview or shift his understanding of his own economic possibilities? 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.Eggers has produced these novelistic-feeling non-fiction books before, and in each instance has allowed a certain self-righteousness on his part to sometimes infect the story. From the bestselling author of The Circleand What Is the What, 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.

The Monk of Mokha’ Is a Little Too Carefully Dave Eggers’ ‘The Monk of Mokha’ Is a Little Too Carefully

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. 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 shift in style appears to have begun with Zeitoun(2009), which followed the trajectory of a New Orleans couple inthe aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was in Eggers’s depiction of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American, and his wife, Kathy, an American convert to Islam, that the short sentences and the flat, affectless register became the preferred style: “Zeitoun got out of the canoe and walked up to the front door. The house would be fine. But he saw no sign of the cat.” It is as if Zeitoun, which is how Eggers refers to Abdulrahman, and Mokhtar have been processed through the same writing machine. With the comedy, I know it’s hard for a lot of people to relate to in this day and age but my faith in God is really a big part of my life. There’s this idea in Islam called Tawakol, putting your trust in God, and so, in those situations, I just had to rely on my faith because logically there was no way for me to figure out how I would survive. That’s the thing about faith, it’s not based on facts and statistics, you just have to believe and let go and that is a very liberating thing. Without that, I don’t think I would have been able to laugh through those awful situations. 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.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. Still, there’s much to admire about Eggers’ approach. He is a writer/activist whose nonfiction work (such as 2009’s Zeitoun) has gone far from the insistent “I” so prevalent in the memoirs of his contemporaries. His 2006 novel, What Is the What fictionalized the like of a Sudanese “ Lost Boy“, and the end result was equal parts problematic and interesting. Look at the growth of Eggers’ 826 Valencia literacy project from its original location in San Francisco to chapters around the country, and the oral history initiative Voices of Witness continues to give voice to the marginalized and unheard.