The Monk of Mokha

October 30, 2017
Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier) tells the exciting true story of a Yemeni-American man’s attempts to promote his ancestral country’s heritage, giving both a timely gloss on the traditional American dream and a window into the nightmare of contemporary political instability. The book first finds Mokhtar Alkhanshali as an ambitious but unfocused 25-year-old who has held a series of odd jobs in the Bay Area—including as a car salesman and doorman. He finds unexpected direction in 2013, when he learns that coffee originated 500-years earlier in his family’s native country, under the oversight of the titular Sufi holy man. This revelation sends him on an entrepreneurial quest to revitalize the long-dormant Yemeni coffee industry. Alkhanshali’s education in the coffee business provides a fascinating glimpse at how coffee is grown and processed today, but his path takes a startling turn in 2015 when Alkhanshali visits Yemen to make final importing arrangements just as the country collapses into civil war. The narrative turns into an increasingly surreal account of Alkhanshali’s efforts to elude imprisonment and even death in order to get the coffee-bean samples he has secured back to America. Eggers’s book works as both a heartwarming success story with a winning central character and an account of real-life adventures that read with the vividness of fiction.

March 26, 2018
Actor Graham proves he’s a natural storyteller in this excellent reading of Eggers’s account of the life of an ill-educated 25-year-old Yemeni-American raised in poverty in San Francisco. After discovering that coffee originated in Yemen, Mokha Alkhanshali creates for himself a mission: to restore Yemeni coffee to its original quality and fame. In doing so, he develops an encyclopedic understanding of the complicated processes of growing, harvesting, and transporting coffee beans, and learns how to judge their quality. Mokha’s entrepreneurial quest takes him to Yemen to make final importing arrangements just as the country falls into civil war and international crisis. Graham’s ever-changing intonation, well-handled accents, and nuanced characterizations keep listeners riveted through harrowing acts of bravery, heartrending setbacks, and hair-raising events. A Knopf hardcover.

Dion Graham narrates this stirring audiobook splendidly. His narration shapes the mind and spirit of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni-American from San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood who pursues his dream to import coffee from his ancestral home. Graham delivers a fine reading of his harrowing experiences: He's detained at gunpoint, drives his coffee samples cross country during Saudi bombing raids, and enters Ethiopia without papers. Listeners will be rapt. Graham's performance brings the two worlds of San Francisco's specialty coffee scene and civil war-torn Yemen together as the story charts the course of the intrepid hero. Mokhtar's mission is to create an import business to help Yemenis sell their world-class product abroad. How he succeeds makes for a remarkable audiobook. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine