Q: Mokhtar, you still operate your company, Port of Mokha coffee, which continues to import coffee beans from war-torn Yemen. How much more difficult has the work become, and how are your workers and farmers faring amid the chaos?

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers | Waterstones

Yemen is also not a very safe place. There was an organized evacuation for American citizens. And the State Department offered vague indications that Yemeni Americans should find passage out of the country by any means available. The funeral was a target—terrorists had made a habit of bombing funeral gatherings to double their body count. The door buzzed. The writer was there, and we stood there, panting, laughing at this, the fact that this was really happening. But there was no nonalcoholic champagne or cider. There were no close friends, no family. It was just the two of us, and the ship was so close. Published in 2006, What is the Whatwas classified as a novel and yet was also the “autobiography” of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee of the Darfur conflict (and now a minister in South Sudan). Eggers’s first foray into a global subject matter, it nevertheless maintained some continuity of style with the earlier books. Narrated in the first person, it was sometimes chatty, sometimes uber-dignified, but always voicey in a manner that was recognizable in relation to Eggers’s initial works. It is as if Zeitoun and Mokhtar have been processed through the same writing machine. In the non-fiction book Monk of Mokha, we follow the recent rags to riches story of a Yemeni American named Mokhtar Alkhanshali. Mokhtar grows up very poor in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. While in his twenties, after the high cost of college ends his educational dreams, he eventually hits on an idea to harvest high end coffee beans from war torn Yemen where his grandfather still lives. In a word Mokhtar is desperate but also very persistent. Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha… first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee… He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God… The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy…

A true account of a scrappy underdog, told in a lively, accessible style… Absolutely as gripping and cinematically dramatic as any fictional cliffhanger. A real life, modern adventure story that is ripe for movie making. Mokhtar Alkhanshani rediscovers the Yemen coffee producing history and globally brings Yemen coffee to recognition and production. His dangerous journey reveals the beautiful but tumultuous setting of Yemen that has been subjected to uprisings, revolutions, invasion, kidnappings and bombings all within recent history. Mokhtar is an inspiration and a role model of ingenuity and hard work leading to great success.

The Story Behind Dave Eggers’ New Book, The Monk of Mokha The Story Behind Dave Eggers’ New Book, The Monk of Mokha

a blended people united not by stasis and cowardice and fear, but by irrational exuberance, by global enterprise on a human scale, by the inherent rightness of pressing forward, always forward, driven by courage unfettered and unyielding. Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ... The Monk of Mokha tells the amazing adventure of Mokhtar Alkhanshali's efforts to revive the art of making quality coffee in Yemen. While Mokhtar's adventure is amazing, unfortunately the book itself disappoints, in two ways: They way it is written, and the actual information that is provided.

BookBrowse Review

In the final scenes of the book, Eggers reveals himself as a “character” directly in the text. How would you describe Eggers’s narrative style throughout this book? If you have read other works by Eggers, how does this book compare to those books from a stylistic perspective? Dave Eggers’s The Monk of Mokha (2018), the third in a series of nonfiction books in which Eggers explores the lives of modern-day immigrants in America, tells the real-life story of Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali. At Port of Mokha, we believe that the very best coffee does more than provide an incredible experience of drinking it. It creates ripples of positive impact that can improve lives, lift economies, and revitalize cultures. 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.