Magisterial and immensely readable... True crime at its historical best, replete with all the larger-than-life characters and thrills and spills of a Netflixnarco drama

With the skills of a fine historian and the verve of a true storyteller Benjamin T. Smith unearths the twisted roots of the catastrophic drug war. A fascinating, surreal and tragic tale

A compelling narrative that at last gives us a history-for-all of Mexico's all-out drug war

Smith's depth of knowledge astonishes... This searing history leaves a mark

A well-researched, sobering view of the damage that Americans' need to get high wreaks on [their] neighbors

A roiling, rambunctious trek through all that created the modern Mexican drug trade ... Really great stuff, really great reading.

The Dope offers an expansive and compulsively readable popular history that successfully upends more than a century of false rhetoric, shattering the most insidious and persistent myths about Mexico's drug trade ... A vital corrective.

At last, a history that truly makes sense of the sound and fury of the Mexican drug trade

The Dope is breathtaking. It casts an unforgiving light on the dark corners of a sinister history.

Benjamin Smith dispels the myths with a much-needed dose of reality ... [A] crisply written, deftly narrated book.

Fascinating ... Smith tells of the forgotten men and women who have shaped Mexico's narco trade - bringing these ghosts back to wild and violent life.

Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick's story reaches out into American political history ... The originality and ambition of Sedgewick's work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer-Central American peasant and North American proletarian-not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism.

Meticulously researched, vivid in its scene-setting, fine-toothed in its sociopolitical analysis . . . Coffeeland lays bare the history and reality behind that cup of joe you're drinking.

How did a cup of coffee become the everyday addiction of millions? In this impressively wide-ranging, personality-filled history, Augustine Sedgewick untangles the routes that carried coffee from the slopes of El Salvador's volcanoes ... To enter Coffeeland is to visit a realm of ruthless entrepreneurs, hard-working laborers, laboratory chemists, and guerrilla fighters.

Capitalism has remade the global countryside in radical ways. Coffeeland brilliantly chronicles this most consequential revolution by telling the global history of one family. After reading Augustine Sedgewick's fast-paced book you will never be able to think about your morning coffee in quite the same way.

Coffeeland will set a new standard ... an innovative study of work, of the work involved to produce a drink needed by workers to keep working. Sedgewick treats coffee not so much as a material commodity but rather more like intangible energy ... provocative and convincing.